promt: childhood smells

the orange sweater my mother wore always smelled of chemical developer, but i didn't know that until i got [to Chester College] but i buried my nose deep into that sweater engulfed and even now it is the most potent memory of my childhood

but i don't remember the way my father smelled, not as easily, but i remember in early mornings when i was as tall as the kitchen counter, before any one had showered or gotten dressed, that he had the sort of smell that made my nose wrinkle and my eyes water and now it reminds me of day-old sex, when i've slept it off without bothering to bathe and how the smell feels oily slick

i remember the smell of the crawlspace under the old house - it was built in the early 1800s and the guy who had built, a captain, a shipping company owner, had hidden a tray under the floorboards and a trapdoor through the dining room under the rug and there was still an old basket there, decaying, like the rest of the house, and it semlled like everything old - a decomposing hill of tomes and geriatric skin scrapings and of osil that hadn't seen rain in two hundred years and filled your lungs like grave dust if you breathed too deeply

i remember the old tree trunk that was taller than my brother and i him on my shoulders and how we would argue how tall it must've been (that was my favorite story mom and dad would tell, the night that they heard the terrific crash gunshot and they called the police - the officer asked if they lived on a dead end when he got there - my parents laughed no and when they were all outside on the street realized that a wall of bark and leaves ten feet tall had appeared at the top of the hill laying across the road, a huge oak that had been there when the algonquins were scraping stones) - i buried my nose into it and breathed natural