breathing

There are all sorts of strange smells lingering in eddies around the house. Smells, like humidity, seem to collect in my son's room at the northeast corner of the house. I air out his room more than any other, now that cold weather has arrived. Tonight, the odor of frying pork chops (like wood smoke) somehow took rest in his bedroom. In the hall, it was brussels sprouts. And here, in the sewing room, I can smell the ginger-orange bar soap from my son's bath. Strange -- makes me wonder how the seeming migration of scents might be related to time. Does air move about the house in a particular respiratory pattern, taking along on a river current the stages of household activity and their residue?

The pork chop smell made me nervous at first -- I opened first the front door, then his window, to see if the neighbor was running his smoker (we've spent beautiful summer and autumn nights in our closed-up house, with grumpy faces, lamenting the downhill flow of wood smoke into our windows at night.) My husband asked at first if something was burning. It's fading though, along with the brussels sprouts odor (husband scalded a pan of them earlier this evening, phew.)

Just lately I'm noticing too the way smells linger in my hair, and in between my fingers even after careful soaping. I imagine how a dog might reconstruct my day...