A SHARP AND TANNIC SMELL

Though I prefer to live in a city, as can be deduced from my sneering at the suburbs in several essays on this blog, there are times when I fondly remember smaller towns.
In particular, several places in South East Asia, where the traffic is far less than in the metropoles but no less murderous, and the fields and forests are barely held at bay.
Not jungle - jungle is actually rather unpleasant.
But hillsides with rice paddies and undergrowth.
Wet, verdant, emeraude.

And also I recall villages in North Brabant, where I grew up.
Those locales are more memorable around this time of year, when fallen leaves drift in heaps, brown and crispy, and the world shuts down for a long dark wet spell, cold and Gothic.
Valkenswaard had areas which during the rest of the year were fairly bland, pleasant enough if not remarkable, but in Autumn became glorious, haunting, and deserted. The long twilights evoked more richly at the end of the year, and vegetal fragrances seemed intensely spicy in colder air.
Often there were nose-echoes of leaf-fires from a distance.
As well as cooking smells from nearby kitchens.
Olfactoria were more alive as light faded.

San Francisco is a lovely city, but there aren't enough trees, and nowhere near enough fallen leaves. Small furry things with vicious teeth do not scurry just beyond the edge of sight here, and cats do not prowl, hunting opportune prey; the raccoons would kill them if they did.

I miss brightly lit cafés, beckoning one in for a shot of Genever, a demi tasse of bitter coffee, and a friendly smoke. Being warmly indoors at a village taproom, reading the newspapers or chatting with semi-strangers, as layers of smoke whisp around the cups and glasses, is a way of life.
Going back will not still that memory; one cannot smoke in bars and cafes anymore. The Dutch have become as pedestrian as California in that regard, it's a change forced upon them by Brussels and the bureaucratic dislike of indulgence that their own Calvinists pioneered.

But at least one can probably wander down the Kromstraat or the Dommelsche Weg, where there are trees and shrubbery, smoking a pipe in the darkness, and happily crunching leaves underfoot.

There used to be a plantsoen with trees where the Maastrichter Weg and the Molenstraat intersected, with a bench amid.
I wonder if it's still there?


The cigar bar on Pine Street is a good place to smoke on Autumn evenings, but something is missing. Probably trees and wetness.
As well as Genever and Dutch coffee.
Certain friendly odours.



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