“The First Person Who Lives In a House Gives It Its Smell and That Smell Goes On Forever”

I can remember with great clarity the smell of my grandmother’s house when I was Kina’s age. There is a specific sort of dustiness in the walls that underlies something green and cool. And there is the smell of sugar and milk from the kitchen, where the water had a specific flavor, sort of floral, rocky, with just a little aldehyde. The cement floor of the breezeway smelled as cement does, and the drywall boards after years of damp did, too. I smell the dirt and the roots of the trees from the basement even through the wall, and the sweeter ground of that basement giving way to the smell of old carpet and French toast as I walked upstairs for breakfast. I smell my grandmother’s cigarettes for a while at bedtime, and then I don’t after a few more years. I recall the smell of those cigarettes and the French toast at five in the morning, when she’d arrive at the house, and her smell lingering there over breakfast and in the car. I can smell the flowers she grew in the breezeway—with the cement and the wallboard—with real subtlety. In the afternoon, with the sliding door open to the deck out back, you could just take in a bit of the river from the cove beyond the tracks. The lazy, fernlike aroma of the grass, damp at the bottom of the hill, where the air was gravelly and green.

Kina built this Parade off of a sticker, fulfilling the long-held promise of a tree.

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