I Had Forgotten You Had A Smell

“I had forgotten you had a smell,” she told her.
And perhaps she did.

The warm animal-dark of horses after rain.
Hay piles fermenting gently in time with summer’s end.
Woodsmoke threaded through damp cuffs in the still of an early winter dawn.
Apples bruising sweetly in cellar crates, fruit flies rising in indignant mobs.
The metallic bloom of blood during lambing.
Rosemary crushed pungent between cold fingers.
Bread steam and salt and yeast lifting before sunrise in the kitchen dark.
Butter, churned twice, thrice, whey stains smelling sharp and useful.

She smelled of seasons crossing through a body.

Of December dust on fenceposts.
Of split pumpkins left glowing in autumn dusk.
Of milk thickening slowly toward cheese while jars click shut against the whisper of winter.
Of laundry drinking silver streams of sun on the line.
Of hands steeped for years in soil, brine, animal heat, rainwater.

There are people now who move through life untouched.
Becoming climate-controlled, deodorised, immaculate, as if this is the goal.
Their days leaving no residue on the world.

But she belonged wholly to it.

The horse steaming in the first light of May.
The garden collapsing under late-summer weight.
The deep fungal sweetness of layered earth.
The beautiful exhaustion of making everything with her own hands again
and again and again.

And what is a life lived fully, if not this;
to smell unapologetically of the life one has carried,
fed, buried, preserved,
birthed, kneaded, and loved enough to let it enter one’s soul.

“I had forgotten you had a smell,” she was told.

And thank God, she did.