And Inhale

What is the smell of apples?

A cobalt glass bowl big enough to wash a new baby in (one of my favorite possessions) is sitting on the table in front of me. No less than fifteen little MacIntosh apples are peeking at me from their smooth blue confines, and when I sat down, I had to look at them because of that smell. It's like an onomatopoeia, except object-visual and nasal, instead of literature-visual and audio. What I mean to say is, these apples smell like what they look like. The deep sweet red and stingy streaks and smears of tart green, electric, living, green spotted by tiny speckles of cinnamon brown. And I can smell the stems, little branchless trees growing up from the island of fruit, hard and earthy and bitter. It's wonderful to pick one up, press it hard against your closed lips and sniff, sniff like you're trying to suck the wonderful thing right up one of your nostrils. Macs are one of those things I appreciate no matter how they are presented to me...if they're warm from sitting in the sun, cool from shade and breeze, not quite ripe enough to eat, or on the verge of being too ripe. I put them to my face, and I sniff. They remind me of all the good things that come erupting from the onset of fall, and all the things I miss from years ago; being thrown into leaf piles, making pyramids of fat acorns and leaving them like pagan offerings at the bases of stone walls for squirrells and chipmunks, finding the biggest, most beautiful maple leaves EVER and putting them between the pages of my thicker books, to be forgotten until I need to see them most and some unseen force directs me to pick up my anthology of Modern American Poetry. My past and present mush together under the weight of hard apples...I am left greedy for my own history even though I have so much, so much Now all around me that I don't know what to do with it.

I want to travel, but wherever I am in whatever autumn, I will demand access to apples.