Serena sat on the porch of the small white house, listening as the crickets began their nightly serenade. Closing her eyes, all the tension left her as she breathed in deeply, filling her lungs to capacity. This is what she had needed. Here in the dark Vermont night, nothing else existed. The rest of the world might as well be as distant as those pinpricks of light that pierced the unbroken blanket of midnight black that lay over the earth like a dome.
It had always seemed to her that no other place smelled quite like this. Interwoven, intermingling, redolent odors gave the night air a perfume that was a part of who she was, of all that she had known growing up. The richness of it all, the scent of the dark, craggy soil, the pungent spice of the Douglas firs, and balsam pines, the warm, mellow essence of the hardwoods that lined the jagged margins of the road, had long ago coalesced inside of her, a fragrance as familiar and as essential as a mother's to a tender babe.
The smell of the earth, full of rock and clay, the underlying mustiness of decaying leaves as you passed the marshy areas along shallow streambeds, the moldy scent momentarily seizing the breath from your throat like some shadowy phantom. The dampness in the late autumn night was like a thick roux added to the mixture of scents, melding, coagulating.
Breathing in through her mouth she could taste each individual plant and weed, each shard of granite and clot of clay, each tree and shrub, the tannic of the pines lingering on her palette. The world tasted of earth and stone, of burgeoning mold and the last of the autumn leaves, of river and sky. It tasted of home.