The Smell of Houses

For some reason when I think of autumn, of summer rolling up like a small smart tongue I think of stepping through front doors–white or black, with gold knockers or doorbells that chime unevenly even when pressed hard–I think of standing there in front of stairs, in front of badly-printed sofas and their fringed cushions, the colours of wine, of soot, of bare and dirty feet, and that scent that comes forward, boldly, from between banisters, from behind broken grandfather clocks.  The way your house smells.  I remember once, Michelle talking about how we can never smell ourselves or our houses.  “Yours smells kind of like old books,” she said, when I asked her.  “That would make sense,” I said, and I wasn’t just saying it.  Our basement is lined wall to wall with old books, old Christian things and fabric-bound accounts of everything that has happened in our western history.  And the living room, too, has its old books: torn covers, exposed cardboard seeping out as if they’ve been wounded over time, a few volumes I’ve moved to my room (Carl Sandburg, an illustrated Inferno, Keats, etc.).  So that makes three floors of old books, perfuming the house.  One of the saddest things about being away from it all is that when I came back for the first time last September, I could smell my house.  To me that meant it was a foreign thing, something I’d gotten un-used something I had to come back to rediscover.  It would have been like Ponce de Leon returning to Europe to find there was always something in the air that made him feel younger, or just plain restored his youth.  It was funny, too, because my house smelled like so many other people’s houses.  I suppose it’s natural to think that it wouldn’t, that maybe yours would smell more of curry, or of lime. (I was thinking mine would smell cleaner, because of all the cleaning that goes on in it, but it didn’t, it smelled like someone else’s home, like they always smell in autumn: wet leaves, pumpkin candles, clean socks and sheets, wood.)  The apartment I’m living in now smells like my grandmother’s place, and I told my parents this repeatedly when I moved in.  “Like Bengay?” they said.  “No,” I said, “I mean before that all.”  My brother agreed with me wholeheartedly.  “That’s paint,” my father said finally.  “That’s just the smell of paint.”  But it was something more than that, because when we painted our living room or my bedroom at home, it didn’t smell like that. (It was rounder, heavier, more intoxicating, as if walking from room to room were like walking from one biome to another: the kitchen the tundra, where appliances smelled only of ice, the dining room, in which the smells were so strong, I wanted to lay down on the hardwood and spot all the mistakes in painting, the places where olive green overlapped antique white incorrectly, and fall asleep as if drugged.)  I know the real reason why autumn reminds me so much of the way other people’s houses smell, it’s because of Norsemen Tag Day, which for some reason I miss madly.  Walking from house to house, off Cavalier, ringing doorbells and begging for money.  And afterwards, talking too loudly with Michelle about what characters these people could create, what states they keep their houses in, and how subtley different each one smelled.