The Smell of Rain
Kelsey Page
It was the smell of rain that kept bringing her back. Images of the thickening forests, growing dark in the dying twilight and looming greatly over her grandmother’s tiny wooden shack would haunt her dreams. The nooks and crannies in the ageless rock formations behind creeks, underneath bent trees, and around sharp turns in a path that she’d created in her mind would shelter her memories from the harsh authority of time. But it never rained here. Colorado was too dry to sing the sweet, intoxicating fragrance that beauty parlors and scented lotions tried in vain to reproduce but always failed at doing so. She missed her knees of childhood. The highways of scratches and small, fine scars that would always divert the eyes of her dates and suitors because they simply did not care to ask about how she played house when she was five and was pushed over by a domineering make-believe husband. They wouldn’t care that was the reason why she majored in women’s studies and firmly, resolutely, refused to wear a skirt to work despite the well-known, well-presumed fact that she did have great legs. There was so much history within that forest. Her grandmother’s voice faintly cracking over the airwaves that would break and shatter against the thick trunks of trees until the echoes would bring her home past forbidden dusk.
She longed to go home. Curiosity at what had happened to that beloved, eroding wooden shack and the boy she’d met behind the stack of firewood every afternoon, kept nagging at her free weekends and fingers as she dialed numbers on the phone to call friends. But, although her fingers would linger slightly over the phone line that had been ingrained into her childhood, for fear some stranger would pluck her out of her makeshift playhouse in the woods one afternoon and turn her into another one of her grandmother’s beloved milk carton models, she could never follow through. Certain smells also sneaked their way into her mind, snaking and curling around the nodes of her brain that would trigger seemingly random images held so dear to her that she could never bring herself to share them, not even in jest, with close relations or friends. The potent, manly scent of bacon made her think of the summer mornings when her grandmother would guard her position at the stove, mighty and proud in her ratty apron and spider-veined legs. She held an air of superiority about her, feeding the deep-fried, crispy bacon to whomever may be seated at her table while spouting stories from her own youth like a teapot blowing steam.
“Sara, don’t you ever, EVER, get married, honey,” grandmother would state, advise, demand. Her voice swung and dipped in and out of an estranged southern accent that no one ever could figure out when or how she’d acquired. “Soon as you turn fourteen, we’re puttin’ you on birth control.”
It was a fact that every woman in the family knew, accepted, and inherited to pass down onto the next generation of strong, fighting women. Grandmother’s tale of impregnation at a young age, before she’d gone to college or had the sense to even consider doing so, was a nightmare that was told as a warning at bedtime and sullenly sworn over at the breakfast table. No one was to question the matter, Grandmother knew best.
“If I hadn’t have had your dumbass uncle and had to take care of your dumbass grandpa, who knows what I could’ve done.” Her eyes would frost over at this part of the story, changing the cold, hard blue irises into something more delicate, feminine, hopeful. Oddly enough, though her stance on birth control and pregnancy was clear; Grandmother was a strong advocate of free-reign sexuality and the expression of such. She was constantly encouraging Sara to go out and play with the neighborhood boys who were always shy to talk to her...continued in print edition.
