- Husband's forehead
- Cockatoo powder
- Fresh popcorn with real butter
- Bruising unexpected bushes
- Fresh, post-storm seaweed
- Hot, dry pine needles in the woods
- Horse brushing
- Horse manure
- Shampoo
- Hot, sweaty, buff guy running past on the narrow hiking trail
- Santa Barbara Sandstone dust in the summer
- Fresh bread
- Cinnamon
- Baked apples
- Lysol
- Dr. Bronner's peppermint soap
- Honeysuckle
- Starch - hot on the ironed clothes
- Warm clothes from the dryer
- Downy
- Freshly poured hard cider
- Fine cabernet
- Hot leather seats in the car
- Open window in a stuffy room
- Basement
- Concrete slab
- Crawl space under the house
- Wine cellar
- Doug's pipe smoke
- Hawaii
- Lemon verbena
- Grease paint make up
Exercise: Write about one smell (with prompts during continuous writing)
Open window in a stuffy room
The smell of an open window in a stuffy room hits me in the neck,
behind each ear. This part of my body relaxes as the fresh air pushes curtains aside.
There is blue sky outside and fresh green of the grass and
bushes outdoors. This smell makes me relaxed. My stuffed inside body
can expand with air, and the neck and ears get bigger, wider, longer.
The smell is always available but needs precaution from weather.
Rain into the stuffy room is best even when frills of lace get damp.
The day - end of day - is time to come home and open windows and chase out
the heavy waiting. Bird waiting for attention. Home waiting to be
lived in.
Each home needs to be allowed to steep - to become what it IS all day alone.
And then the people come in and open the windows and
let the fresh movement in. From outside. Fresh halts the decay.
Rejuvenates, sparkles the wooden floor, warms linens, releasing the
comfort smells of husbands and laundry and fabric softener.
A solitary smell. Open the window anytime, but the smell only comes when alone -
when there is time to just breathe. Maybe it could be shared with an
intimate loved one. Open windows merge the possible future and the
current moment. The outside of fresh with the inside of decay...or dust...or simply calm. Calm. Warm. Settled. Not stirred...moved...complicated. In/out and constant versus perpetual motion.
