Sometimes I smell smoke.
It's not the comforting smell of a wood
fire, safely crackling in a fireplace, behind screens or glass, or
within a ring of rocks, it's not the sticky smell of a grease fire,
nor even, thank the heavens, the acrid, plastic smell of an oil
refinery burning. I've smelled them all, and others, the smell of
dying dreams as a home burns, the bacony smell of the crematorium, a
scent that still makes offering some foods enough to send me running
for a place to throw up.
It's the smell of cigarettes, papery,
chemical tobacco, burning the back of my nose when it comes, and I
cannot exhale enough to clear it, nor will incense or open air clear
it. It comes, it lingers, reminding me.
He smoked, from the time he entered the
army to the days he lost himself in the sickness that killed him, he
smoked, cigarettes mostly, whatever brand he could afford, a pipe if
he was given tobacco for it, a cigar from time to time, if someone
else had a child and gifted co-workers or friends. The cigars always
smelled like autumn, but not the clean scents of dying leaves, and
coming winter, they smelled like damp and mold and sour.
Not pleasant, but the smell of
cigarettes is comforting, for all it makes my lungs heavy with the
reminder of the danger of second hand smoke. I don't smoke, never
did, but I will likely find his smoking fatal, as he did. It is
still a link, a reminder that even gone, he's checking in on me, as
he did when I was a child, making sure I'm home, sure I'm safe, sure
I can be found if need be.
He did that, she did that, looking
after their last child, the child that surprised them both, ten years
after my closest sibling, as I looked after them in their later
years, at least, trying to. They raised me to independence, and
didn't understand that independence meant I'd chafe at being expected
to put self aside, becoming their attendant when I'd begun to make
steps away from them.
So now, with him, gone, with her gone,
I smell cigarettes and am reminded that they remembered me.
377 words
ReplyDelete