About the Author Fever of Unknown Origin Published Work Poetry Samples      The Scent of Lightning      A Little Tenderness      Smoke Contact

The Scent of Lightning When I try to write about summer smells, I find I don't know their names, except for pine, which is obvious, or  roses fresh cut grass, creosote on the damp highway, the smell of warm dust speckled with the first drops of rain, I find myself talking instead about my mother who says that even lightning has a smell "Crouch down," she says, "if you smell it. "That means it's going to strike right there." bad luck for her now, to have such an exquisitely tuned instrument and be caged in the nursing home. There even creosote would be better  than incontinent bladders, incomplete baths, the sweet rotting smell of cancer. A nurse pulls a heavy blanket of lysol over it all and even that fails to cover. My mother looks down at the contracted hand, lying in her lap "My hand smells sour," she whines softly. "It bothers me."  Certain flowers, my mother says, bother her. Carnations, mums, some of the lilies. Funeral flowers, she calls them. She prefers lilacs, peonies or lumberyards littered with fresh cut timber and hills of sawdust, her old unwashed dog, the steaming earth in the backyard of her house in Whitefish Bay after a thunderstorm. "We were all so happy there," she sighs, forgetting the next day's scent of cigarette stubs soaked in bourbon and vermouth When I was a child my mother always knew where I'd been and what I had for lunch. "Intuition," she said it was.  Now I know it was airborne molecules of onions, bologna, Alice's mother's Chanel #5 entwined in my hair and clothes; Even my feelings had a smell. "Are you sad?" she'd ask, hitting it right on the head.  I learned to cover up, the way a hunter rubs animal droppings into his skin for camouflage; I carried rage, embarrassment, guilt, to the shower. "using Prell shampoo again dear?" she'd say, when I came out. If my mother were here with me now, sitting on a wooden porch step in Waushara County, she'd name these smells for me. "Willow," she would tell me, as she watched those clouds build in the Western sky. "someone's hay field, the Christmas tree farm across the highway, a dead squirrel under the porch, this morning's coffee cups unwashed in the sink. And, soon, the lightning."