SPRING SWAN SONG 06.20.13

(A piece of short fiction I've been working on. Hopefully, this posting will foster further ideas and directions for these characters. What's happened? What's happening next? I'm looking forward to finding out.)

---

They met up again, under the bridge this time. There was no other place as familiar anymore. Tension now twisted her everywhere, warping her sense of comfort and ease. There were no more easy moments left in her life, no sense of stillness. Only constant movement, as though she were being spun around, caught in a centrifugal force, her stomach perpetually afloat.

The rain had been intermittent for most of the day. On her walk over, along the cracked sidewalks and wild grasses, the skies began to darken. She caught herself being comforted by this, which surprised her. Perhaps it was the air swelling with potential, and the sure arrival of that potential. She thought of the ease of nature, to shift into its next state, not worried about its outcomes, its savage powers of equilibrium.

...

Safe beneath the bridge, they watched the rain come down on either side in curtains of white and grey. There were dark smells down there: piss and mildew, the rawness of the river, the scent of wet pavement from above. His smell cut through it all. His sweat still clinging, the cool air chilling his skin. She ran her hand along the rising bumps on his arm, put her nose in the crook of his neck. Her finger and thumb loosely gripped his wrist.

...

"How long have you been here?" she whispered.

"Not long," he replied. "I thought I had been early, but I guess you were too."

"I was looking at the time all along, but I found myself lost in it. The hands of my watch weren't making sense...like I had forgotten what they meant."

"Like when you say a word over and over again?"

"Yeah...kind of. Though it's not like I was trying to make sense of them. I knew when I was going to come, like how I sometimes wake just before my alarm clock. You ever done that?"

"Not for a while, not since everything's changed."

The sheets of water were breaking up now. Her head on his shoulder, she watched the dappled patterns of rain upon the river rocks. Fat raindrops and their chaotic spray, water leaping into the air, water coming down. 

"I don't have many patterns left either," she said, placing her nose back into the crook of his neck. "It used to happen to me so often. 5:59 on the dot, just enough time to reach over and hit the button before it could screech at me." 

He laughed and she could feel him smiling: an interruption in his gentle strokes, up and down, between her shoulder blades.

"Leaving the house to come here--it was a like a notch in my day...My days now so much like dreams. Stepping out of my door not because my watch told me to, but because the time finally slid into place and I slipped on my shoes."

EVENINGS 6.13.13

Truth coming to me.

Wandering thoughts. 

Eurekas. 

Loose ends meeting. 

The simple answers, the easy answers. 

The balancing, back and forth.

Playing guitar.

New discoveries.

How the patterns on the fretboard

translate into new meanings and shortcuts. 

The math present and visible.

Later, walking alone in the dark, 

under the streetlights and the dim stars. 

The color of leaves in the artificial light.

The rain falling down. 

The sound of it coming down on the petals.

ROOTS 6.6.13

"I heard there was a secret chord

that David played and it pleased the Lord,

but you don't really care for music, do you?

"It goes like this: the fourth, the fifth,

the minor fall, and the major lift--

the baffled king composing Hallelujah."

- Leonard Cohen

Music describes relationships of all kinds. Music tells stories in a universally native tongue. Music is math, and math reveals to us G-d’s secrets.

In Western music theory there are 12 notes to choose from, including all the sharps and flats (e.g., F sharp, B flat). There are 7 natural notes in all. Using the C major scale as an example, they are C, D, E, F, G, A, and B. After B, the pattern repeats and we come back to C, but now an octave higher. If you can sing “do, re, mi, fa, so, la, ti, do,” then you’re familiar with the C major scale.

A chord is made up of the first, third, and fifth notes of a scale. Therefore, a C major chord is composed of C, E, and G. In this case, C is the root. The root provides the chord's name and its companion notes provide the structure--determining whether it's minor, major, diminished, etc.

A typical song consists of three chords, usually based on the first, fourth, and fifth notes of the key you're playing in. In the key of C, those chords are C, F, and G. If you know three chords you can play, literally, thousands of songs. Just choose a favorite key and run with it. In the key of D, you’d use D, G, and A. In the key of E: E, A, and B. 

Get past the theory. Just play. Just sing. It’s regenerative. It’s grounding. It’s humbling and inspiring.

The more I play music and the more I sing, the more I understand not only the numerical relationships between notes and chords, but the emotional ones as well. When you stray from the root of the key, you long to come back to it. It feels, inexplicably, like home. 

In a well structured song, there are dips and rises. Your heart falls into the song, and you trust the progression of its chords. From the root chord of the key to the fourth, it’s just enough of an adventure, just enough tension to provide a thrill, and a return to home feels that much sweeter. 

There are different feelings for different progressions. I know this not from theory but from practice and experience, from quiet mornings with coffee and raucous campfire nights.

I am guilty of over-thinking in my life. I wish to understand the workings of my passionate pursuits. But these yearnings are only means to an end. I wish only to deepen my experiences, to speak and understand in more elegant ways, to find the simplest solutions--which are often the most beautiful.

FAUNA 05.30.13

Three Cat Haikus

Cat nap, belly up.

Stay here, kitty. I have work.

It's fine, don't get up.

Cat between my legs.

Perched atop the duvet, warm.

I'm stuck while she yawns.

Scratch scratch. I'm awake!

Okay, I'll let you out now.

Okay, take your time.

FLORA 05.23.13

Take a slow walk, a right step and then a left. You are pulled neither forward by your past nor backward by your future. The ground moves beneath your feet, leading you to the edge of a wood.

Step delicately upon soft, mossy logs. They give way, sinking into the earth from which they sprang, many many years before. Their endurance has relented, embraced now by the simplicity of decay. Step deftly between the delicate new growth of trees and plants. Watch as they bend and sway in the breezes that sweep by your ankles.

The leaves at your feet are damp--the smell of recent rains linger. You pace along, dream-like, here below the canopy. Time seems to move in faster currents above. The rain's influence is not yet diminished by the afternoon’s hot, raking sun. Lift your head and feel the air's thickness on your lips as your breath draws in. Inhale the exhalations of those nearest you.

Be careful! You’ve nearly tripped over a root. Look down.

The wet weave of leaves are torn, revealing the histories of years past, a palimpsest of oak and maple and cherry and aspen and birch. Lost in identity, into soil, disassembled to mingle among the fine dust of forgotten mountains. 

The hills summits' behind and before you once offered higher views. Shear peaks in this valley have come and gone. They rest now beneath your feet, crushed by the years, by the strength of water freezing and thawing, by wind, by scraping glaciers, by the heat of the sun, and by the pull of the earth.

There are stories in this wood which have come and gone: of venerable trees, of magnificent creatures, of foolish and enlightened men--their stories as plentiful as the leaves littering the ground, and as impermanent. They have come back to the earth that gave them form, that gave them sustenance.

Walk among them. Step upon a mossy log. Breathe in the rain's remnants. Take a right step and then a left.

GROWING 05.16.13

"What would you like to hear? What would I tell you about growing if we were sitting across from one another? What would you tell me? I think of that tarot card. Is it the seven of pentacles? Hard work and harvest, pride at your efforts."

___

I spent all of my childhood summers in North Bennington with my grandparents. They live on a quiet, one-way street lined with tall pines. When I started riding a bike, I was allowed only to the end of our neighbor's white fence. Later on, I could venture to the end of our lane, and later still I could take a left onto the back road, as long as I stayed on the paved portion. Beyond was still off limits.

Just a few years later, my friends and I were allowed to ride down the back road and beyond. It was about a mile into the village center for candy and another half mile to Lake Paran, where we ate chips and fast-melting ice cream under a shade tree, and where we stood at the shore, preparing ourselves for the water's shocking embrace.

___

"I guess growth is always hard won. It's not necessarily an autonomous process. Well, no. It can be. I mean--plants and trees can grow wild and free, needing only the help of the elements. The beauty of forests comes from this process overlapping itself in all its stages, abundant life and adundant decay."

___

The Adirondacks were created when the land forms now known as Africa and North America collided. Their peaks rose slowly over millenia. They were sharp and high, like the Rockies in the west, or the Himalayas in the far east. Over time, they've been worn down by erosion, by water and wind, by changes in temperature, pebble by pebble.

___

"But if you want a particular result, some work must be done. If you wish to dream up a harvest, you must put the work in to sow and reap it."

___

When I was studying to be a teacher, I learned of a psychologist named Lev Vygotsky and his theory of the "Zone of Proximal Development." Very simply, it's a model that shows how you can't push a student to learn too much all at once, especially if you deny the context of their abilities and experiences.

You must first understand your students through careful assessment and observation. Given the topic at hand, you must discover their comfort level. From there you can push, but just a little. You want to offer challenge but not too much. 

Too much can turn a student's enthusiasm off, pushing him or her away from learning. Too little may elicit boredom or, even worse, laziness--offering success too early and with little effort or aspiration. You must encourage a healthy appetite for challenge and curiosity, but also offer the requisite skills and knowledge to overcome them.

From there they can seek out their own challenges. Learning is not an outcome but a process. 

 

This could be said of many things, I suppose.

___

"There was a stagnation of growth in your life. You felt as though you were at an impasse. I don't know what you thought or felt. I may never know. Did you lose faith in your own ability to grow, even as you marveled at the beauty of growth around you?"

___

A student of mine recently told me, with obvious awe and fascination, that Gingko trees can live up to a thousand years and beyond.

ELEMENTS 05.09.13

A decade ago, a friend taught me how to read Tarot cards, and my perspective hasn’t been the same since.

 

I don’t give readings to others as often as I should, as often as he would've liked me to. But I sit with the cards he gave me in times of deep reflection, in quiet rooms, still and peaceful. I cradle them, shift them about in my hands, and they speak to me in meanings as they spill out seemingly at random.

 

Their edges are soft and worn. The cloth they're kept in is saturated with memory, heavy with the weight of decisions and surprises and longings and struggles and love.

 

There is an unexplainable, irrational aspect to Tarot that I admire. Although I consider myself to be a rather objective person—preferring to hold and feel things, to take notes and observe—I choose not to ignore what I hold and feel inside, those imperceptible wisps of intuition and awe.

 

I believe in the romanticism of coincidences, often taking them at face value, especially when their chances for existence are slim.

___

 

Put simply, the language of Tarot is spoken through archetypes. There are the major archetypes, otherwise known as the Major Arcana (e.g., "The Sun," "The Moon," "Justice"), and there are the minor archetypes, otherwise known as the Minor Arcana. These are divided into four suits, similar to those of modern playing cards: the wands (clubs), the cups (hearts), the pentacles (diamonds), and the swords (spades). Each suit contains cards numbered ace through ten, followed by the royal cards: page, knight, king, queen. Within each suit lies degrees of meaning unique to that suit.

 

Together, these cards work together to describe the myriad elements of life and experience. Put into simple patterns and drawn in a particular way, they tell you a story. They hold a mirror before you; not to your face but to your soul. They do not show you the future, but instead your direction and momentum.

 

However, Tarot is not just a story-telling device. To me, it is much more. It informs my perspective. Its various elemental structures multiply in complexity when combined. And, since life is complex as well, Tarot's simplicity helps me to understand, to slowly disassemble the incomprehensibles.

___

 

Imagine the entirety of your life as a tree growing in a forest or field.

 

To live you must have soil to sink your roots into, from which you gain stability and nourishment. There must be water present for you to grow, to provide further nourishment as well as comfort. There must be gentle breezes to circulate about your leaves, bringing you fresh air, taking away the old. With these simple needs met, your roots plunge ever deeper, and your branches thrust themselves up and out, yearning for the sun.

 

As you grow, some of your branches flourish. Some lose their life and strength, growing hollow and brittle.

 

One summer, a strong wind comes along and shakes your leaves. The strongest of your limbs remain intact, your weakest do not. But there's no need to fear! You're still growing, and now have more energy to give to what hardship has left you.

 

One summer, the water doesn't come. There is no balance in the cycle above and below. You are starved and shaken by its inconsistency. The sun beats down; the air is hot and stale.

 

One summer, the water comes so quickly that it nearly knocks you down, robs your roots of its dear soil. You survive, but barely. You live to grow on and up and out.

 

You endure and survive, until one day you don't.

___

 

It seems fitting that in Tarot there are four elements, just as there are four in nature. This is a matter of design, I believe, rather than coincidence.

 

When I think of the cups, I think of water and, therefore, emotion—that ebb and flow within us. There must always be balance for us to be healthy and thrive. We must let whatever we feel pass through us, unjudged but respected and appreciated for what it is.

 

The pentacles I associate with earthly existence, representative of a solid foundation, a tangibility, a cornucopia of nourishments which make life possible. Our desires, both needed and wanted, come from pentacles.

 

The swords I pair with wind and also with the unmistakable force of truthful communication, with ourselves and with others. The truth can take us apart, especially where we are weakest. The power of spoken and written truth often highlights the truths in us, and breaks down the lies we've let grow inside.

 

The wands bring to mind growth itself—spirit, some might say. This is our will to live, our yearning towards the sun. This is our accumulation of experiences, our wisdom. It is a beautiful thing to grow wild and free, and though all our efforts may not be successful, to simply engage in them is enough.

ON MY PLATE 05.02.2013

I eat as one might paint: with a palette of flavors for my blank tongue—or for my blank palate, you could say. I mix and match, combining flavors and textures.

My food inhabits specific places on my plate, each element separate and waiting.

There are particular flavors and textures that I admire most, or rather, that float readily to the surface of my mind, vividly sensorial.

Onions come up over and over again:

Thin-sliced, nearly razor-thin, in a salad. (There are different flavors with different thicknesses.)

Minced in sizzling butter, the smell filling a home quickly, putting smiles on faces in distant rooms.

Diced with rough chopped cilantro topping stewed meat nestled in soft corn tortillas.

Sliced longitudinally, into thin crescent moons, slowly stirred in the pan until brown and sweet.

And then there’s all the rest, one set of flavors cascading over another:

Fresh crusty bread,

garlic oil,

creamy brie,

prosciutto.

Fresh hummus, warm pita.

Fried chicken, the crust crisp and fighting back, yielding to moistness.

Grilled bread, and while still hot, still barely manageable with your fingers, raw garlic rubbed deep into the crumb.

Macaroni and cheese, from scratch.

Vinegar-spiked beets with crumbly, tangy goat cheese.

Fresh tomatoes off the vine.

A certain earthiness, the taste of soil and sunshine.

A musty quality.

The sharp, peppery bite of arugula--"rocket," so say the Brits.

Small, sweet, briny mussels, bathed in garlic and white wine.

The crispy bits of cheese that melt to the bottom of my toaster tray.

Salty, very thin potato chips.

A poached egg.

The first runnings on buttered, crusty toast.

Something my friend's father turned me on to. Strange but good:

sharp cheddar,

thin slice of raw garlic,

dab of hot sauce.

Smoked meat sandwiches in Montreal. Soft rye. Sharp mustard.

Fragrant rice waiting for any number of curries.

The gentle snap of delicate papadoms between your tongue and the roof of your mouth, the toasted spice blooming.

Soft pretzels, crusted with rocky salt, dipped in strong mustard.

The cool satisfaction of beer to wash the salt and mustard away.

Garlic roasted in its skin with a bit of olive oil, salt, and pepper.

Good with toasted bread, but easy enough to eat like candy.

Strawberry ice cream, just melted a little, a viscous puddle at the mounded base. The central scoops soft and pliable.

Yum.

MORNINGS 4.25.2013

My first apartment, when I was nineteen, was on Blodgett St. in Burlington's Old North End.

I was so excited when I finally found it. I had been looking for a place for a couple months, driving up on the weekends from Brattleboro, crashing on dorm room floors and on living room couches.

In the meantime, still living my life in Bratt, I was learning how to read Tarot cards from a dear friend, taking my first college classes, and helping to build a house up on a mountain.

My friend, dear Chuck, had a dream about this new place, before I moved in, after I had met my new roommate and shook her hand. I had come home so excited, talking about it, wondering about it, worrying about it. His dream had something to do with the cherry tree outside the living room window. It bloomed and unfolded, he said, revealing two tarot cards slowly morphing into one, creating a conversation in meaning.

Years later, those cards' symbols are foggy in my memory—I haven't told the story in so long. He loved to tell it, and could do it so much better than I. Whatever was said, they heralded a message steeped in truth. (Whether or not I've experienced that truth over these years is something left for hindsight.)

Life away from home was hard at first—still is sometimes. The complexities of a budget, rent, utilities, groceries, etc. I couldn't find a decent job at first and my savings were running out. I ended up washing dishes at an Outback Steakhouse. I'd come home tired and wet and smelly.

But mornings in the kitchen on Blodgett St. were so lovely. We had a south-facing window. It shed light directly upon the kitchen table, where I sat with my morning cup of coffee. I drank it black in those days.

I made it then as I do now: with a single cup drip filter; putting the water on to boil first then preparing the grounds. The grounds and water combine, the steam issues forth, and the cup slowly fills.

Some quiet mornings, sitting at the kitchen table those first few minutes, the coffee still very hot, I’d witness something magnificent, something true that stills draws my attention.

I'd bring my face down close to my cup and see a fine mist shivering just above the black surface, fracturing violently at irregular intervals, like lake ice snapping into portentous cracks.

With the steam rising in curling ribbons, I’d sit in awe, hunched forward, staring, the time slowly passing. My roommate still asleep, the kitchen bright and breezy, I was grateful to witness the simplicity of this beauty, which had been, all the while, silently dancing beneath my nose—some bit of truth to start my day and carry me through.

BUILDING 4.18.2013

I once lived with my family in a triple decker in Somerville, Mass. (My father says Summahville. I do too sometimes. When I've had a bit to drink or when fatigue is washing over me, the tongue of my childhood comes back to me—not that I ever wanted it to go.) My grandfather had bought it decades before, my father's father. In it, he and my grandmother had raised six children, living on the top two floors and having a tenant on the first. My father was the youngest, still is I suppose.

I was born at Mt. Auburn Hospital in Cambridge, and I was brought home to this house on Lowell St. in Somerville. And two years later, my little brother was brought there too.

My brother is deaf, and my mother hard-of-hearing. I grew up with two languages: American Sign Language and English. My first sign was "milk," my first word "hi." I signed before I spoke.

I've never had any problems with hearing. I suppose one could say I was lucky in that regard, but from the way I've been raised, I don't perceive deafness as unlucky. I don't perceive silence to be taboo, or unwanted. It was my existence too, and continues to be.

Silence was my home, is my home.

Conversation came at times, catching up after school with my mother or my grandmother—who continued to live on the floor below us. I could hear the sound of my father's Chrysler mini-van coming around the corner from Barstow Ave. I'd announce his arrival. My mother could always rely on that. The sound of the TV I remember, all those shows that I watched day after day with my brother, side by side: Darkwing Duck, Square One, Punky Brewster, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Saved by the Bell.

(I watched Seinfeld with my grandmother too. She made me toast and tea. The glass kettle whistling away in the kitchen.)

My brother and I shared the couch and the remote, each of us on our separate cushion, passing the remote back to the other every half hour.

I knew some signs, but not all:

no

stop

thank you

you're welcome

please

my turn

share

food

drink

ready

want

now

Those are just some that come straight to mind. Our vocabulary was limited, but it was the vocabulary of young brothers. As we grow older, our lives grow more complicated, and the language between us has been striding to catch up.

My brother still looks for his place in life, as do I. 

When he was younger—when we were younger—he'd play with legos. He had several bins full, the accumulation of many sets all mixed up. The sounds that he would produce!  Croosh crooosh croooosshh! as he searched for the perfect piece. The brrrr beh beh beh noises that his lips would create, as he moved his car creations along the floor—the sounds of engines that he'd felt, many times, deep in his chest.

He built within his silence as a silence built within me, in Somerville, on Lowell St., in my grandfather's triple decker home.

SKY: 4.11.2013

A dear friend once taught me how to give offerings of tobacco, and thus how to transmit my prayers and thanks to all corners of the earth--north, south, east, and west--and to the heavens--to the Great Mystery, to my ancestors, to Mother Earth and to Father Sky. Today I think particularly of Father Sky, but I can't detach the Mother's relationship to him, try as I might to focus only on him. For it is there quarrelling and love that I live between, their everyday movements that influence my experiences in this life.

Here is one such experience:

During the warmer months in Brattleboro, nestled in the Connecticut River Valley, there is often a mist that clings there, possessing different qualities with each new visit. Sometimes the droplets of mist are large and clear to see. Sometimes they are miniscule to the eye but nonetheless possessing clear substance when collected together. Some nights the mist is so fine that it merely brushes over your cheeks, rather than settling upon them. There is a hint of moisture, but it is fleeting, insubstantial.

I cherish this mist in its myriad forms. Grey days are imbued with a smell of life, the air thick with the breath of plants and trees, new air pouring down the river valley.

My clearest memories of this mist are at night while biking down certain streets criss-crossed with overhanging branches. With no traffic before or behind me, I have slowed to a crawling pace, enough to keep steady and moving. Some branches on these streets hang just below a streetlight, their leaves shedding a glow, and this glow possessing gradations of light and dark greens. And within these luminous streams, between the canopy and the pavement, hangs the mist, swirling and tumbling--as hot steam does, dancing above freshly poured coffee. At this sight, my feet will come down on either side to keep me from toppling as my bike's slow crawl ceases.

The sky trapped in the valleys of the earth. I have only ever known them in relation to one another. They have many more tales than I can tell.

- James Branagan

SENSES: Smell 04.04.2013

I don't know how others may experience this, but to me it feels like knots, a heaviness in my chest. It's not always extreme. It's often imperceptible, an unconscious nagging. It may be from anxiety. It may be from fatigue, worry, doubt. It may just be the result of a cloudy day. Whatever it is, it must escape or else settle darkly within.

I have various ways of discovering what this darkness is and where it lies. Writing has helped in this regard. It's a way of having a conversation with myself. And sometimes I reveal my own secrets. Like finding a map to a hidden pressure point: once pushed, ahhh, a sigh is released, something escapes to the light.

Particular smells cut out all the small talk that writing to one's self provides. These smells enter your mind through different means and undo your tensions with ease.

Two stories and several stragglers may help me to explain.

...

I once lived on High Street in the Brooks House. (Moved out just a few months before the fire actually.) I had electric heat, didn't have a lot of money, so I kept it around fifty. Wore slippers always, a sweater, and often a hat. The drafts were bad. I'd hold my hand by the window and feel the cold air pouring in. So I went to the hardware store and got some pliable foam for the cracks and gaps, and some plastic sheeting to cover the windows from top to bottom--the kind you tighten and seal with a hair dryer, laborious but effective.

It was horrible. Felt like I was living in a plastic bag for five months. The cold air didn't enter so boldly now, but the warm air, from those few unexpected days in winter, lingered just on the other side of plastic and glass.

Then came early March and the hope of spring winds. I didn't dare strip the plastic from my windows yet, but the longer days and the addition of an hour to the afternoon buoyed my spirits. As did the hyacinth plants that I started to bring home from the grocery store.

Their fragrance simmered in my small apartment all day, slowly creeping into every crevice, and building up an offensive at the doorway. Striding through the door, bewildered and fatigued from another school day spent with at-risk youth, I was always tossed sideways into delight and contentment. I'd be drawn by the nose to the short wooden shelf where my hyacinth sat innocently.

I'd approach with care and reverence, as though it were a sacred object. Breathing out first, clearing my lungs, I'd bring my nose close to its stalk of flowers and inhale deeply, filling my chest from the bottom up, holding in fragrance, the sweetness lingering in my nostrils, a lightness and ease coming over me. Then, I'd breath out and feel lighter still.

...

Pho Hong in Burlington's Old North End sells, as you might have guessed it, pho--immaculate pho, at that. The broth clear and rich, the noodles soft and fresh, the meat tender. It's served to you in a deep bowl with a variety of garnishes: lime wedge, cilantro, thai basil, mung bean sprouts.

The first time I had pho I thought these garnishes were a quite unusual side salad. I tore the basil and cilantro leaves over the sprouts, sprinkled it all with lime juice, and dug in. Refreshing but not too appealling on its own. I was embarrassed to discover later that they weren't, in fact, a side salad. I haven't made the same mistake again.

When the steaming broth now appears before me at the table, I stick my face down into it. My glasses fog up. I take those off. I breathe in the steam, filling my lungs. I sigh deeply. Now having entered a new world, I look to my other options.

First the bean sprouts, those go in. Then the cilantro and basil are torn and sprinkled down into the steam. They wilt immediately and the scents drift up; my face coming down again to meet them. With my glasses still on the table, slowly defogging, I sigh again, deeper this time. Something in my chest unwinds itself and pushes for my throat. When I squeeze the lime its spritz leaps into the air, and its juice drips down. Sometimes, if the sunlight is angled just right, I notice the spritz still hanging in the air, mingling with the rising steam, and time slows.

I lick my fingers, pick up my chopsticks, and my head lowers once more; I sigh once more. With this sigh, the knot now untied in my chest, whatever I was holding rises up and out, and I eat.

...

The heavy, clinging smell of a fire. Music, revelry, and reverie. A connection with times past.

...

The smell of a lover. The exchange of breath. Their scent on your fingertips.

...

Soil from the garden left beneath your nails.

...

Cherry tree blossoms warmed in the sun.