Scents

Descriptive writing engages all the senses, immersing the reader in an imaginary world, helping them suspend their disbelief. Most authors do well at describing sights and sounds but too often overlook the remainder of our highly sensorial existence.

Of all our sensory systems, smell is the most strongly linked to memory. Scents have the power to carry us back to even our earliest experiences with vivid detail. The fragrance of the lip gloss worn by the first girl I kissed still propels me back to that nervous moment with all its associated sensations and feelings. Even the details of my surroundings, her street, her house, her room, flash across my mind whenever I catch a hint of that cloying and artificial adolescent scent. Remembering it makes me smile.

On a warm, spring day a few months ago, Karen and I explored Heritage Village, a park recreating life early in Pinellas County's history. It is composed of historic structures relocated from around the county, several houses, a barn, a garage and general store, a water tower, a train station and railroad passenger car, a carriage house, a bandstand. As an exercise, I tried to catalog some of the scents we encountered that day as we wandered.

First, we toured the houses, mostly multi-storied affairs from the turn of the last century. Each was a collection of small and simple rooms that reminded me of my grandparent's house on Ocean Street in Quincy. Some were built from light and rough-cut cypress, others from oak darkened and polished smooth by many hands. In every one, the scent of lumber had long been replaced by a musty odor I associate with a Weymouth basement, not unclean so much as slightly damp and under-used. The smell of dust stirred from where it had settled in the corners mixed with a hint of mold slowly spreading its tendrils into any unsealed crevice and a suggestion of compacted dirt somewhere beyond the light.

Another New England memory drifted up in one entry with the smell of dusty cloth rising from a well-worn rag rug whose once brightly colored braids had grayed and were in need of a serious beating. Upstairs, the bedroom was an overlay of a cedary top note from long stored linen recently aired as a toile spread was snapped across the bed to prepare the room for guests, and the tangy base note of lemon oil applied in rich, gleaming layers to the dark, walnut furniture like we smell when opening a drawer in Karen's grandmother's china cabinet, or folding down the writing surface of her great aunt's secretary. The parlor contained the musty-dusty scent of long undisturbed crushed velvet mingled with that of brittle paper captured in cracked cloth bindings. The dormant kitchen still held the clean scent of flour mingled with baking powder and darkly seasoned cast-iron cookery ready to be pressed back into service baking biscuits at any moment.

In a garden beyond the kitchen door, a chest-high rosemary bush's sage green leaf-like needles emitted a pungent cloud of essential oil that hung in the air whenever anyone brushed past, reminding me of the savory aromas of a Mediterranean kitchen. Down the path to the bandstand, a blanket pine needles baked in the bright sun, emitting a dry, slightly resinous odor I've long associated with August hikes and sunny afternoons at summer camp.

The rough and mismatched slats of a barn were still enough to trap the scent of old, mostly evaporated gasoline emanating from the rusty tractors stored within. The simple, open-air stalls lining the outside held the more familiar smell of trampled hay mixed with manure, long un-oiled leather and a hint of musk from horsehair hanging in the combs. In the nearby carriage house, the smell of hardwood charcoal bellowed to nearly smokeless orange embers almost overpowered the lighter scent of red-hot iron being pounded in horseshoes.

More modern, industrial scents clung to the other spaces we visited. The couplings of the railroad passenger car near the train station were heavy with the smell of thick, industrial grease, which gave way to hot, painted metal as we ascended the steps to look inside. The fainter smell of pitch-preserved railroad ties greeted us as we descended. The lighter scent of motor oil and other lubricants clung to the Model T parked inside the mechanic's garage. You could just detect the sweet and tangy hint of oranges near the packing crates in the general store.

In the field beneath the water tower, I could almost smell the thick gray, sharply sulfurous smoke of black powder from the muskets and the cannon clinging to the warm wool Civil War uniforms from recreation of a skirmish they hold there every year. As we headed home across the pine bridge, the dank, earthy smell of mud mixed with decomposing leaf litter by the stream bid us a pungent Florida farewell.

Cats live in a world where scents paint a picture as clear to them as the view outside your window. In order to understand and accept something new in their lives, they have to sniff it. Fragrances and aromas permeate every moment of our lives, but unlike cats we rarely take the time to notice. Even you don't live in such a rich and redolent environment, I hope something in the above descriptions stirred a pleasant memory within you.


© 2008 Edward P. Morgan III

Thank You and Goodbye

By the time I found them again, they no longer had names, only numbers. To the county, each could be represented in five digits, like a concentration camp internee whose identity had been tattooed upon his arm. To me they were living, breathing creatures that deserved a chance to stay alive.

Of course, they never knew they had been named. They were wild animals, feral cats who were part of the colony that lived behind my townhome. Brothers or cousins, one was all black, the other a pale gray tiger that Karen and I had watched play as kittens, watched grow over the previous year. We had watched with disapproval when my neighbor started feeding them, first once a week then once a day. Watched with pity when she stopped, saying, now there were too many. And then with horror when we saw the trap.

Not so much saw it as heard the angry and confused cries of cats testing a cage on my neighbor's porch. When I peered through the screen, I saw the long, metal trap, the two brothers pacing restively within. Every instinct told me to test the screen door and, if it was open, release them. I decided to pursue their freedom through a more legal means that didn't involve the words "breaking" and "entering." Stenciled across the trap in black, blocked letters was "Pinellas County Animal Control." At least I knew where to start.

The next day Karen and I drove to their facility, a series of cinderblock buildings that reminded me of a bunker complex in the somewhat rural center of the county. I thought it would be easy, just claim them, pay the fine and set them free. But the women at the front desk had no record of two cats being picked up from our neighborhood in a trap. We were welcome to look around.

We scanned the adoption center, the neat and clean, brightly painted public area which housed all the kittens and gentle adults. A quick search confirmed that neither of our two was that tame or desirable. So we were escorted behind the counter through the double steel doors with chipped, surplus tan paint into the unfinished working areas of the facility. Looking back, they should have placed a sign above the entry like Dante: "Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate."

The strays, normally solitary creatures, were packed eighty or more to each of the five enclosed pens, climbing the chainlink, clawing and biting the metal strands, searching for any escape before a needle and the incinerator transformed their lives to smoke and ash, and the cage was refilled with their brethren. "Only 94 today," our guide mentioned offhandedly.

Karen spotted the black through the perpetually shifting bodies, crouching near the back of the enclosure marked "Tuesday," the day he would be destroyed if it rolled around again. To prevent that I claimed him as I wished that I could claim them all. His brother was nowhere in sight. So we were led deeper into the labyrinth, through a another set of doors into another ring of feline hell.

Stacks of individual cages, each just large enough for its occupant to stretch whiskers to tail, formed chest-high corridors redolent with urine and fear. Some individuals were labeled with a warning, like "Bites." Most only bore a five-digit number stenciled across the card with the information vital to their destruction, barely readable in the dim, flickering fluorescent light. Some growled or hissed, or swatted at a passing sleeve. Most curled up as far as they could from the barking din nearby, feigning sleep. After wandering corridor after corridor, we finally found the gray tiger with a card marked "Aggressive," head on paws, seemingly resigned to his fate.

Our two lost souls reclaimed, we were guided to a worn exam room with concrete floors and metal tables that smelled of disinfectant where they would receive their shots from the county vet. The vet techs asked with concern if I was certain I wanted to adopt them after seeing how wild they were, giving me dubious looks when I said that I did. They insisted that I hold the black for his shots, saying that if I didn't they wouldn't let me take him, thinking I would come to my senses and back away. I didn't.

The black received his vaccinations with great reluctance and some struggle resulting in a scratch or two. Perhaps it would be easy after all. When the tiger's turn came, he earned the label from his card. First, the techs had to use the loop around his neck just to get him out of the cage. When they did, he fought and slashed like the wild cat that he was. Skin was broken and bled. Scars began to form. Unsatisfied with a few scrapes, his teeth found purchase on a finger and sank in deep. I howled which scared him enough to let go and retreat into a corner where the techs looped his neck again before stuffing him back into the cage.

That encounter earned them both a mandatory twelve days in quarantine for breaking skin, with a trip to the emergency room for a tetanus shot with a two-week course of powerful antibiotics for me while I waited to see if they came up rabid. I knew it was unlikely. At that time, there hadn't been a case of rabies in the county for over 20 years.

The techs asked if I was still certain that I wanted them, whether I was going to come back for them, thinking as they watched me cradle my hand in my handkerchief that I wouldn't. I left them no doubt that I would. Satisfied that I would follow through with my lie taking them into my home, the techs softened, saying they would be ready when I returned, shots and all.

The nearly two weeks in isolation took any remaining fight out of them. The quarantine area left both of them with a cough, the black's worse than the gray's. After paying the $138 in fines and fees, and ushering them into the carrier I had brought, I finally took them home. Once there, I placed them on the porch to make sure they were ok before I released them. The gray tiger seemed mostly healthy, interested in the food I gave him, if as cautious of me as I was of him. My finger still throbbed. The black only lay in the carrier, wheezing and sleeping. There was no way I could let him go just yet.

After the gray tiger ate his fill, I opened the screen door to the outside. He approached it cautiously, step by step, conflicted by seeing me in the path of his freedom. Then he started into a dead run for the door from several feet away, swerving around me. He disappeared quickly into the palmetto stands around the oaks behind the complex.

The black I tended overnight. I opened one of my remaining antibiotics and mixed half into his food. I knew from the cats I owned that the dose was close to what he would have gotten in a day from a vet. He ate hungrily then slept. I fed him again the next morning with a second dose mixed in. Again, he wolfed it all down. When I came home from work that evening, I prepared a dish one final time with a final dose of antibiotics, hoping that it would be enough. He had improved significantly, his breathing was clear, and now he was restless. I opened his cage on the porch and set the food beside the screen door before retreating back inside. He ate ravenously as I watched through the kitchen window, bolting back into the carrier as soon as he heard me at the door.

I opened the screen door to the porch, then sat in the chair across from it and waited, very still. After several minutes, he slowly emerged from the carrier he now thought of as his territory, a retreat he could defend. With a careful eye on me, he crept toward the open door. At the threshold he sniffed the air and relaxed a bit, seeming to recognize the scents of home. Then he looked at me as though asking for permission. I nodded slowly though I knew he wouldn't understand the gesture. He crept outside a foot, then two. He sniffed the grass, then tested the scents on the air. I figured he would disappear quickly at this point, just like this brother had.

Instead, what he did stays with me to this day, set clearly in my mind. He turned around and came back onto the porch through the open door. He approached me cautiously, watching for any sudden motion. I sat frozen, knowing if I moved he would be gone. Once beside me, he rubbed against my leg hard enough for me to feel through my jeans, once, then twice, and slowly but more assuredly headed back out the door. Outside again, he looked me in the eye a last time over one shoulder, then walked toward the palmettos, unthreatened, vanishing between their fronds without a sound.

I never saw either of the brothers again, as I hoped I wouldn't. The techs had warned me that if they were rounded up a second time, as repeat offenders, the county would not let me save them from the needle's kiss. With no one feeding it, the colony disbanded but didn't quite dissolve completely. That winter on the eve of a Christmas freeze, Karen adopted one of their sons, or brothers, or cousins, another gray tiger, young enough to adapt to humans. The years he lived with us were like touching a piece of the wild. He was willful and independent.

A year later when the brothers' license renewals came, I listed them as "no longer owned." As if I ever had or could own them. As a final act, I recorded the names I had given them on the forms, to show, if nothing else, that they were more than numbers to me. For a year, they and their siblings had greeted me each morning or evening when I returned home from work, depending on the shift. Their mother had allowed Karen and I to watch them from the porch without much concern, until she drove them off to fend for themselves one day. Even then, they remained close to where they had grown up, sharing our backyard as their home. 16017: Dark Sky; 15985: Silver Moon. I hope they lived their remaining days as they were born, wild and free.

On days that I wonder what footprints I leave upon the sands of this world before time and tide wash them away, I remember that clear, cool Florida afternoon in spring when a creature who had no reason to trust me re-entered an enclosure that could have been another trap just to say thank you and goodbye.

That memory is worth the scars, faded now but still visible on my finger, sometimes throbbing though not often. It reminds me to give thanks for life and each opportunity I am given to survive, no matter how little I may understand the moments as they pass me by. Perhaps the need is instinctive.


© 2007 Edward P. Morgan III