SMELL YA LATER!

Sweet peas, chicken shit, and everything in between.

Jul 28, 2025

Summer enters through my open windows each morning—earthy, dewy, and a little obscene. By the time I let the dog out at 6 a.m., it’s already embedded in my nose. Before I drink coffee or remember who I’m supposed to be, the nose has already filed its report: damp soil, dog shit, the metallic tang of hose water.

Scent arrives like an uninvited guest, and barrels straight to the oldest part of the brain, swinging open doors I was sure I’d locked. Magnolia and I’m at the Fort Greene farmer’s market in spring. Peppermint, and I’m twelve, catching my dad and stepmom “having fun” in the mint patch. Hospital soap and I’m at Daisy’s bedside, wishing we were barefoot in the grass. Sugary milk breath and I’m carrying baby James in from the garden, pollen in his hair. Jasmine and I’m weeping like a Victorian ghost, for reasons unknown to myself. Sandalwood and I’m reliving every relationship I had between 2012 and 2016.

Daylight in the garden is all show—color, form, posture—but scent is the backchannel. Sweet peas smell like lace and lullabies, too soft for the chaos around them. Lilies barge in, smelling of funeral homes and colorful self-importance. Marigolds reek of stubbornness, tired of proving their worth in gardens that only wanted them for pest control. Lilac smells like something sweet, soft, and sad—like longing for something that hasn’t even left yet. The Germans (of course they would) call it Sehnsucht.

And roses—sigh.1 Their scent isn’t just one thing, it’s a symphony. Damask varieties, the OG scent queens, come in hot with velvet and drama. These are the ones perfumers, apothecaries, and emotionally unstable poets have swooned over for centuries. The musk types stay close to the skin; the myrrh ones have opinions. Some smell like the color pink took a deep breath. All of them kiss you like a ghost who remembers everything.

But it isn’t just the plants. The garden hose in the midday sun smells like hot rubber and carcinogens, which is also how I remember my 20s. The compost is failure fermenting into hope, steaming itself into redemption. The chicken run is birth and breakdown in the same breath: yolk, shit, feathers, and the quiet churn of everything becoming something else.

Manure says: I was shit and now I’m power.

July says: I will overwhelm you, and you will like it.

My armpits at 2 p.m. say: You’re still alive, and you still stink.

At night, the garden stops performing and starts revealing itself. Bats dart low across the sky, drunk on overripe tomatoes and compost steam, and I think: of course it’s the night creatures who navigate by smell.2 Day is for eyes; night is for memory.

After sunset, the garden loosens its grip on propriety and starts to breathe in musk and sugar and rot. Everything honest comes to the surface. Nicotiana keeps her mouth shut till dusk and then exhales like a woman finally undoing a zipper. Evening primrose unfurls under moonlight, all pale petals and citrus breath, hoping you’ll come closer. Honeysuckle smells like warm sugar and dusk—just a little wild, like a childhood secret whispered through a summer fence overgrown with climbers. Desire, grief, survival: all of it has a smell if you stay still long enough.

So lean in. Breathe deep. Let the flowers, the chickens, the compost, the sweat, the ghosts speak first. The nose will translate. The heart will catch up.

🪱 COMPOST FOR THE SOUL

When nothing else subsists from the past, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered... the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls... bearing resiliently, on tiny and almost impalpable drops of their essence, the immense edifice of memory.

—Marcel Proust

🐓 BACKYARD DISPATCH

The Coop Scoop

I’ve gotten many3 requests for footage of Feather Locklear crowing. I’ll admit, it’s been hard to capture—he’s surprisingly camera-shy for someone so photogenic. I’m not sure why—he’s such a beautiful creature. Luckily, I managed to sneak a recording of our elusive starlet while hiding behind the squash patch. So without further ado…

Off-camera, he’s incredibly proud—crowing all day, seemingly without rhyme or reason. We really must get to the bottom of this performance anxiety. I’m considering EMDR therapy. He is so elegant in his sulky, feathery way, and even if he’s a bit touched, he has nothing to hide. I remind him of this as he runs away from me across the chicken run, dodging my attempt to hug him like the old days.4

Stay tuned for updates on Feather’s confidence.

🌹🥀 WHAT’S BLOOMING & WHAT’S DYING?

Blooming: Zinnias—my god, the zinnias!—leading the charge in my garden’s maximalist phase. My first sunflower cracked open this week, tall, self-important, and golden as a cult leader’s aura. Rosa ‘Darcey Bussell’ is a rose in a red velvet bra, too gorgeous to trust, too fragrant to resist.

Dying: Sneezeweed—she sneezed. She weeded. She died. Farewell, weird little firework. Nasturtium—She needed a drink, not a eulogy. I gave her neither. Freedom of Speech—wilting fast under the hot breath of fragile men with weird hands, fat ankles, and thin skin.