Autumn Scents
Dad’s Alive Again
Forest in the rain — the smell of Dad alive
Perhaps the wind just shifted, or the scent just decided to rise, but all of a very sudden my head was filled with Dad and me walking the Swedish autumn forest not far from our brave little house out there among the wind-swept fields.
We always wore rubber boots then, in the fall. His all black and big, and a little ungainly (they struck me as) and mine black, too, but smaller and with a reflecting band (made to shine by car headlights; I think we called them reflexband in Swedish) round the top of each shaft, there to make you easier to spot walking along dark October roads. My boots were quite new and I thought they were very, very cool — much cooler than his old, clunky ones.
I asked him once whether we should put sticks down the shafts of our boots to fool the badgers in case we ran into them (who will attack and bite and bite harder and harder until they can hear bones — or, cleverly, sticks — crack and only then do they let go.
Oh, we don’t have any badgers around here, he’d say and that ended that discussion. Looking back, I have to hand that one to him: I never saw a badger in the wild when and where I grew up. We learned about them in school, of course (including the sticks in the boot-shafts trick); I saw some in zoos, but never in the wild. And I never wore sticks in my boots.
Dad was often busy with his work (he ran his own company, and as sole owner and ditto proprietor you really are on the job 24/7, as they say) but when he had some spare time, he’d either park himself on the sofa and read the latest Donald Duck & Co. comics (which he subscribed to, they arrived every Wednesday) or he’d come get me and ask me if I wanted to (as in tell me that I wanted to) head out for a forest walk with him.
Initial (internal) reaction, always: no.
Official (external) reaction, always: yes.
And once on the trail I always realized that I actually loved it, walking in this particular forest, on this particular path, with this particular dad, at this particular time.
And the smells, the smells. Reaching and filling a younger and much more sensitive nose. The smells.
They say that dogs can smell up to five thousand times better than humans, and I just can’t get my wits around that, especially considering that very fine and working-just-great child nose of mine in the forest with my dad. I could smell the mushrooms for heaven’s sake. Just walking bast them I could smell them.
“Those are death caps,” he said once, pointing at the little congregation of pretty red (with white little dots) mushrooms to our right. We stopped to look at them. Yes, I could smell them.
“Never, never, eat those,” he said. “They’ll kill you.”
I knew that already. Another thing we’d learned at school.
We’d also learned that the best mushroom to eat, the most delicious said our teacher, is the chanterelle. Fried in lots of butter, it’s heavenly, she said, and I could tell that she was thinking about just that as she told us: she was actually licking her lips, and smiling at the remembered taste.
“I know,” I said.
If fragrances could have colors (which they may well have for dogs, who can’t see color from what I hear), I’d be walking through a million-colored dazzle aside my dad. Looking back, I’m smiling. At the time I wasn’t, for this was just regular life, wasn’t it? Nothing special. Just a walk in the forest with my dad.
I bet you anything that dogs see scents; five thousand more shades of fragrance than us humans — the full color spectrum of scent. And the mama dogs will teach their dog children about humans and how we (poor things) cannot see scent.
And now, perhaps mistaking me for a dog, so many years later and Dad long gone, the dazzle of scent suddenly rose and made my nostrils stand to attention; made them absorb and send on to my mind the same dazzle, the same vivid autumn dazzle that had Dad walking by my side.
Alive.
© Wolfstuff
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