Goodly Fragrance

Mrs. Johansen always complained. She’d whine about newsprint smearing. She’d grumble that I folded the paper wrong. Never mind that I was delivering to all her neighbors; she knew that some of them, most of them, were waiting for a chance to steal her newspaper, and she’d make me wedge the paper—folded in thirds—between her door handle and the jamb.

Dave Clegg

Which was fine on a Saturday. But who could get a fat Friday newspaper into that narrow space? So, every time I fumbled at the door, I’d hear her. Well, no, not every time. Memory is a boastful guide, at best. But often enough, she’d be up at six in the morning: a hatchet-thin woman with an angry glare and a terrycloth bathrobe, snatching open the door to catch me, and I’d mumble something while she snarled that her paper hadn’t been delivered earlier, folded just the way she liked.

I tried rearranging my route to reach her at different times, but it didn’t matter. She was always there, and she hated me, and I hated her as I trudged through the snow. It was dark and cold, those winter mornings: cold enough that the snow would squeak beneath my boots, and I’d leave a trail of sharp footprints across the lawns. Until I got to Mrs. Johansen’s house.

Now, this is a Christmas story—a memory that came back to me the other day as I swept the snow off my own South Dakota porch. It’s a commonplace, of course, to say that smell is the most evocative of senses, but the fact is not less true for that. Some scent I caught as I worked seemed to fish down into the ice-ponds of memory and pull up, almost intact, the fragrance of old Christmas wreaths on the doors of dark houses. The smell of newsprint. The rich ozone aroma of diesel exhaust from a school bus warming up in a snowy parking lot. The snow itself, for that matter. In those days, the world smelled different to me in snow: crisper, cleaner, harder.