The Smell

"Burned Mattress & Debris in the Woods," http://www.flickr.com/photos/mundane_joy/2060779511/in/faves-29879040@N03/

A friend once said to me, "I love the scent of pine cleaner! It makes everything smell so clean."  I think we were in our twenties, and she was living by herself, in one of her first apartments -- still a smoker at the time, her apartment cluttered here and there with ashtrays and textbooks and laundry baskets.  Maybe we were splitting a gallon of ice cream, talking about boys while she mopped.

But I've never liked the smell.  I want to say, "because it doesn't really smell like pine" -- but actually I have no idea if it does.  I did eventually know what a pine tree smelled like, sure --  but by then it was too late.  I know that I learned at some point, for example, that there was a particular lip balm that was red-- and that it was supposed to smell like cherries.

Does it? To this day, I don't really know.  And if it weren't for the "grape flavor" label -- the purple color -- I wonder:  in our natural habitat, would we know to be reminded, when we smelled it, when we tasted it,  of that dark, sweet fruit?

Pine cleaner didn't remind me of the smell the plastic Christmas tree that came apart every January and sat in the basement for another year.  Pine cleaner smelled like my mother's efforts to keep us from being upset when the no-name brand roach motels didn't seem to be working that well.  Pine cleaner smelled like moving to a smaller, dirtier house, in a dirtier, less sunny neighborhood.

It smelled like the family that, for all we knew, was getting evicted that day when, the landlord told us, come and have a look.

It smelled like the house of the family that was leaving this place that would soon become ours -- though never really ours -- for a smaller, dirtier house, on an even dirtier, even less sunny street.