I listened, while the scents found their hiding places in the cracks in the floorboards, and the words of the story, and the rest of my life.

Scents were like rain, or birds. They left and came back.

She had built her restaurant kitchen out of scents and tastes and textures, the clean canvas of a round white dinner plate, the firm skins of pears and the generosity of soft cheeses, the many-colored spices sitting in glass jars along the open shelves like a family portrait gallery. She belonged there.

My father had always told me that my birthday was the first day of spring. Not a specific day of the year, but the feeling- an undercurrent of warmth waking up the earth. The scent of violets. Green in the air, he called it.

I breathed in variations in wood smoke, smelled clams both fresh and dry, the scent of freshly gathered apples. Mud from my shoes and the smell of autumn leaves in the rain. The differences had been there all along, but I had been distracted, waiting for an entirely new world- a shift into an unknown realm. What was on those papers was far more mysterious.Memory.

The surface of the water quieted into a mirror; it looked as if we were moving through two worlds, with trees living equally above and below the surface. A seal head emerged, and its liquid brown eyes watched us pass. I could smell magic in the air again, and I wanted to sob with the relief and pain of it.This is who you are, the trees said."Oh," I said, so low I didn't think it was even a sound.