THE SMELL AND THE COLOR OF DUST
When I was ten and my sister was eight, our house was under renovation. It was our mother’s first foray into interior design, and just like a bipolar scientist, our home was to be the first of many experiments under her overzealous aesthetic scalpel. Everywhere we looked there was the debris of her architectural conceit: sacks of cement, sawed-off plywood, and paint buckets.
When you’re a child, your grasp of colors extends no further than the 32 in your crayon box, 64 if your parents were feeling generous. I remember my sister and I crouching in front of the paint buckets and excitedly reading the labels, mouthing out strange colors like “BURNT SIENNA” and “LAKE MIST”, rolling the words around our tongues, like licorice. And, when we were satisfied with the novelty, we’d stand up, dust off our knees, and let the new colors linger on our lips while we played by the hollow blocks.
Wherever we went, we walked into clouds of dust, like birds disappearing into nimbus. And cement dust has a specific acrid smell to it: an olfactory cocktail of mold and chalk, of change and uncertainty. We learned at a young age that if sadness had a smell, it’d smell just like cement. And the house reeked of it.
One day in the summer, we’ve had enough. My sister and I decided to make some popcorn after watching a Tom and Jerry cartoon where the cat filled the house with popcorn by accident. Navigating through the piles of cracked tiles and pipes scattered throughout the kitchen, we took a huge pot, put it over the stove, and filled it with unpopped kernels. It only took a minute before we heard the first POP, the herald of a winter wonderland in the middle of a blistering summer afternoon. Soon, the symphony of pops and the smell of warm butter filled the kitchen, as we stood beside the stove with our mouths open trying to catch each one, like snowflakes, or rainfall.
(I should to mention: my mom’s disposition during this time was atrocious. Sometimes I think it was during those days when she felt it was time to go into menopause, albeit two decades too soon. Looking back, I think she forgot we were children. Instead she saw us as pieces of her that always seemed to disappoint: a bum knee that creaked when she’d play tennis, or a hand that shook too much when she tried filling out subscription forms in Architectural Digest.)
Anyway, as my sister and I were still lost in the flurry of free-flying popcorn, my mom appeared in the doorway. She was livid. She announced her arrival by banging her fists on the louver doors, and then followed this with a trumpet of curse words. We quickly shut off the stove, closed the pot, and before we could pick up the popcorn that missed our mouths, she had us by the collar.
She accentuated each insult with a blow. A slap here, a shove there, a finger jabbed at our foreheads painfully. Credit where credit is due: she barely left bruises or welts, although I remember she had a few strands of our hair between her fingertips. It was a parliament of punishment, and the caucus was in high session.
Our sentence was thus: NO T.V. FOR A WEEK, NO TRIPS TO NATIONAL BOOKSTORE, AND MAKE SURE YOU PICK UP EVERY LAST KERNEL FROM THE FUCKING FLOOR.
And then she left to oversee the installation of the french windows over at the patio.
We were left in the kitchen, the smell of popcorn quickly losing to the fog of dust. My sister and I stood there, silently combing the floor for the debris of our mistakes, paying for our foolishness to think that there was something for us beyond the soot and cement and sawdust.
Crouching to pick up the last kernel, I saw a bucket of paint in front of me.
“POPCORN YELLOW”, the label read.
I tried to laugh, but all I could do was wipe my eyes.
When you’re a child, your grasp of colors extends no further than the 32 in your crayon box, 64 if your parents were feeling generous. I remember my sister and I crouching in front of the paint buckets and excitedly reading the labels, mouthing out strange colors like “BURNT SIENNA” and “LAKE MIST”, rolling the words around our tongues, like licorice. And, when we were satisfied with the novelty, we’d stand up, dust off our knees, and let the new colors linger on our lips while we played by the hollow blocks.
Wherever we went, we walked into clouds of dust, like birds disappearing into nimbus. And cement dust has a specific acrid smell to it: an olfactory cocktail of mold and chalk, of change and uncertainty. We learned at a young age that if sadness had a smell, it’d smell just like cement. And the house reeked of it.
One day in the summer, we’ve had enough. My sister and I decided to make some popcorn after watching a Tom and Jerry cartoon where the cat filled the house with popcorn by accident. Navigating through the piles of cracked tiles and pipes scattered throughout the kitchen, we took a huge pot, put it over the stove, and filled it with unpopped kernels. It only took a minute before we heard the first POP, the herald of a winter wonderland in the middle of a blistering summer afternoon. Soon, the symphony of pops and the smell of warm butter filled the kitchen, as we stood beside the stove with our mouths open trying to catch each one, like snowflakes, or rainfall.
(I should to mention: my mom’s disposition during this time was atrocious. Sometimes I think it was during those days when she felt it was time to go into menopause, albeit two decades too soon. Looking back, I think she forgot we were children. Instead she saw us as pieces of her that always seemed to disappoint: a bum knee that creaked when she’d play tennis, or a hand that shook too much when she tried filling out subscription forms in Architectural Digest.)
Anyway, as my sister and I were still lost in the flurry of free-flying popcorn, my mom appeared in the doorway. She was livid. She announced her arrival by banging her fists on the louver doors, and then followed this with a trumpet of curse words. We quickly shut off the stove, closed the pot, and before we could pick up the popcorn that missed our mouths, she had us by the collar.
She accentuated each insult with a blow. A slap here, a shove there, a finger jabbed at our foreheads painfully. Credit where credit is due: she barely left bruises or welts, although I remember she had a few strands of our hair between her fingertips. It was a parliament of punishment, and the caucus was in high session.
Our sentence was thus: NO T.V. FOR A WEEK, NO TRIPS TO NATIONAL BOOKSTORE, AND MAKE SURE YOU PICK UP EVERY LAST KERNEL FROM THE FUCKING FLOOR.
And then she left to oversee the installation of the french windows over at the patio.
We were left in the kitchen, the smell of popcorn quickly losing to the fog of dust. My sister and I stood there, silently combing the floor for the debris of our mistakes, paying for our foolishness to think that there was something for us beyond the soot and cement and sawdust.
Crouching to pick up the last kernel, I saw a bucket of paint in front of me.
“POPCORN YELLOW”, the label read.
I tried to laugh, but all I could do was wipe my eyes.