Brackish water seeps in every fall. There’s a dreadful quality, a dreadful worry, in the air.

What happens in October? What have the winds and crying clouds to say? The whispers begin in October, the “seasonal affective disorder” comes alive and insists on fading out the sun’s warmth and placing this sadness at the foot of the day. October is the time of whole moons and a cascade of trouble.

I watch gray air force itself to emerge over the light. I stand with my cup of coffee, noticing more the coolness of the porcelain than the heat I want to drink; I watch the leaves tumble in stop time out the window and shiver. Here comes winter. Here comes the broad hand with its sting and slap, and I duck my head to evade it. There is no match for nature, the murmuring grows louder: Winter.

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At the mirror, watching herself. A shimmy shake, a quick twitch of the hip. Grab the thick cut glass, the aromatizer, and feel it’s heavy weight. It is weighty, the glass is square and thick, belying the sweet, round light within.

Her perfume is mainly floral in its nature. It’s roses and ivy. And it is shadows and violins, a watercolor of a sandy beach, and beautiful old gospels and darkness and fading dreams and sometimes it’s tired but grateful motherhood and hopeful woman–it is a perfume of so many things. Her scent is a flower left in its early days, not burst open. It is captured, bottled sun, distilled hope and happiness, fragrant appreciation of the sweetness in her everyday life. It is the smile that covers over her heart. Her perfume lies in a bottle, it’s pretty messages waiting to be told.

The thousands of times she has held the bottle to the nape of her neck…the ritual of perfume, it has a voice. It says: come into view, be alive, be real, attract, act, be conscious of self, help, notice, show up, give, stay awake. Don’t give up. Be lovely. She watches in the mirror as she lifts the bright glass again to her throat.

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