"Short Takes" #4

"Muskgrass Chara" by Kathleen Dean Moore

I just can't seem to get away from smells. Since Diane Ackerman entered my life, I am acutely aware of anything and everything having to do with smell. I'm not sure what happened; maybe she brainwashed me. This week, I read "Muskgrass Chara," which I randomly turned to in "Short Takes." That's kind of the pattern I've been following: read whatever I open the book up to. Interestingly, her first sentence was "I used to love all smells" (104). My immediate response was oh god and an eye-roll. Not that again. But, I gave Moore a chance, and I actually found the piece, though very short, to be strangely comforting. 

The essay takes you through her relationship with scent. She begins the piece by explaining that she'd always loved smells – even what some might consider to be gross, like a fishery. She then talks about how, when her father was sick, he had a "terror of odors," and she seems to associate that with a fear of growing old or incapable. She says that her father "became more and more body" until that, too, began to deteriorate. Her relationship with smells changes there, at least from my reading of the essay. She obsesses over smells in her own house when her children come back to visit, trying to mask certain scents, hoping that they do not think that the house smells old. Moore finishes the piece with an anecdote about a trip she takes on the water every October, where she smells Chara, an algae, which her father apparently would have known the exact name for. I think that the way she ends the piece was beautiful because she ties in what she'd been talking about, smell and her father, with something more personal. She seems to focus on time and aging earlier in the essay, and she says that when she smells the Chara, she is reaching the point where "night is covering the day." 

To me, the story has a flow of a sunrise to sunset, where we see the meat of her ideas in the middle of the "day." Ending the story with a smell that she finds peace and comfort in and returns to every year was very appropriate. She closes the essay and thus "ends the day" there. 

I liked the short essay, and I know that was a lot of words about it, but to be honest, it wasn't my favorite so far. It just took me a while to make sense of it.


This week I also read:
"Opposite of South" by Sven Birkerts

His name is Sven, which is cool, so if you can't decide what to read, give that a shot if for no other reason than his sweet Latvian name.