August 22, 2009
Photographing milkweed pods, and the 1936 World’s Fair replica of Abraham Lincoln’s cabin.
At the moment, time to go write some fairy tales, prairie tales, broadcasted from back in the past but directed towards the future.
As it turns out, I had completely forgotten how much I adore the smell of midwestern radiators heating up old wooden buildings. I haven’t experienced that smell since a few life-altering months spent with the Quakers in Indiana when I was a teenager. Like the dreams of a writing tower, the smell was simply waiting to re-introduce itself to me. It hasn’t changed, though I have.
Amazing how each architecture has its own scent, and how delightfully it intensifies when heated up. And how there are minor shifts of scent patina depending on the type of heat — hundred year old hot water radiators in hundred year old prairie houses are simply magnificent in their ability to broadcast a comfortable domestic melancholy. God bless the arts and crafts movement, with its beautiful dialogue with wood. And we humans, doggedly trying to forfend the elements.
This morning the temperature dropped alarmingly to what feels like 55 but may be 70 – shivering, I decided I wanted to procure a green sweater and chocolate. Four of us walked the mile to the milky-white skinned hamlet of Lake Forest and procured a green sweater and chocolates. Which at the moment, I am quite enjoying.
Tonight, my tower is quite cold – hence the radiator, which at four fifteen in the morning has now inexorably coaxed forth the release of a century of humidity trapped in the pores of clapboards, and invoked rather a startling combination of the following entrained scents:
…mouse ghosts
…milk paint
…cast iron muffin trays
…disintegrating parchment lampshades, with flaking glue
…moth wings, with their fuzzy bodies dehydrating, and slowly de-furred
…old hairbrushes
…elm and maple wood floorboards, with linseed and pine oil
…flannel sheets used only during a winter flu
…lubricating oils from toy train sets
…clock boxes
…chicken feathers
…woolen bedroom slippers of a clean but geriatric relative
…sadness, longing and belonging caught up in old spider webs
With the Quakers, there was the smell of boiled black coffee on a tabletop, and we cold, confused and woolen clad children. Hand rolled cigarettes, with white cold breath mixing with our grey smoke. Hands shaking from it, lips chapped and waxed. Someone laying prophetic fortunes with a pack of playing cards. A soldier reading poetry in Hebrew, cooking tempeh with eggs. Waiting for the shoes to dry, watching the wood warp around the eaves, wondering what would happen when we grew up. I think as a teenager, the intensity of scent is still in the collection phase, and not yet the recollection phase. Back then, though, we knew we were on to something strong. Maybe that’s why children smoke cigarettes to rebel. Because the actual oxygen is too intense.
I washed off my work boots in the sink this evening after a muddy walk through the prairie, when I was caught out in the rain. The windows are creaking, heated from inside and being soaked from outside, with just the glass in the middle as mediator. It seems far too fragile to withstand those opposing pressures from all sides, but it’s doing fine. Turns out it’s actually surprisingly resilient.