I have a candle, with the strong scent of field clover.

[crim son]

The humidity drew out its perfume though it was not lit, and it said, light me, so I did.

Scent. It has more power over me than any of my senses. I know what you all smell like, my friends, my family and my lovers. I dreamt of E recently, and he had the strangest odor the same as always ... you had to love him to love it. Then M of the tacky aftershave; I had a friend who could not sit when he was near, he did so offend her sensitive nostrils. M, he was the scent of something I found at a campus bar and I swooned over for just about ten years or twelve. I can remember the rare times I climbed into my mother's bed and smelled her nightgown. Forgive me, but she was well into wifehood and motherhood and smelled of last night's dinner and her own thighs. Those scents, too, made me swoon, so much that I dared not enter my parents' bedroom without my stomach turning in fear/horror/confusion/anomie.
My children wake me at all hours. There is no line separating us. I didn't do it on purpose but there it... isn't. I think about scent when J curls up against my body with no consciousness of my gender or anything else other than the fact that I am Mama. I have a scent, no doubt, though I don't wear one.

The candle smells like clover and I can't remember when it first burned me - last year or the year before. It isn't easy to tell, oddly. The joy and hope and despair are mixed like a marbled cake batter. Asshole was revelation but TB was revelation and opium and sugar and the softest feathers. But there were thorns and there were lies.

I inhale this scent and thank the Deity for the long night and relative void that is my life. Some confessions I cannot make for fear of advice! I must focus on me, despite the pull on all sides to pretend I don't exist. Me, I wish her gone; bright and then puffed up and delicious like the scent of my candle, and then gone. It's incredibly apt, right down to the haze of dark debris at the base of the wick. Pull me out a year's hence and I will still unsettle you.


I'm starting to write. Advice? Kind comments?

[CaliforniaPeggy]

1. My dear crim son...

This is prose poetry, and it is wonderful...

I was thinking "how poetic" long before I got to the end...

Keep it coming!

And, I'm jealous of your writing style...

You make it look so damn easy...

Keep on keeping on...

:hug:

[crim son]

2. You are... patronizing me?

I don't care. I'll take it.

It's a blog entry. I'm trying something new... thinking about what I write.

Thank you, Peg. How kind and wonderful for you to be the first & perhaps last to comment!

PM me if you are lying. Don't worry; I need criticism.

[CaliforniaPeggy]

3. I didn't mean to sound patronizing!

And I apologize if I did sound that way...

I think it's beautiful!

And I really mean that...

:hug:

[crim son]

4. You didn't sound that way.

I do admire your writing and so value your comment; simple as that.

I wrote as a teenager and in HS and college was advised to continue. I didn't. Lately I've thought about it more,

Oh hell. You know how this goes. Don't you just love aspiring writers? We are a laughable bunch.

Thanks, Peggy! :hug:

[CaliforniaPeggy]

5. Ah, thank you, my dear L!

Yeah, writers can be a laughable bunch...

But I love hanging around them!

They always have the coolest stories to tell me!

Good night...I'm tired, and heading to bed...

:hug:

[crim son]

6. Sleep well.

I wish I were also abed! :pals:

[some guy]

7. making scents of words.

Maybe it's because you're writing about scent, but the way the words flow, it's like smelling a scent, that isn't quite identifiable.

The words draw me in, and are both evocative of something, and intriguing, and at the same time elusive, I can't quite capture what draws me, so I want to be drawn a bit deeper, so I can recognize the allure.

I think it's very, very good. :applause: