I always thought the smell of the top drawer of my father’s dresser came from his
tobacco. He kept a pipe nearby, along with a dish full of coins and a watch on a chain
under a bell jar. When I opened that drawer (not thieving, just intrigued by the prospect
of a matchbook from a foreign country or some treasure like that) I was struck by a smell
that I didn’t know from any other part of the house, certainly not from the drawers in my
own room.
I just now realized it is not tobacco but old paper—notes on scraps, sketches, foreign
currency, photographs in brown paper sleeves, those matchbooks, life’s many mementos
impossible to throw out or display. It is not the smell of a junk drawer in the kitchen. It
is not the smell of anything in the room of a child who has lived for only ten years or so.
It is the smell of paper, some of it decades old. I know this now, after opening the top
drawer of my own dresser, being briefly astonished, and leaning in.
All Rights. Jack Granath.
Jack Granath's poetry has appeared in Poetry East, Rattle, and North American Review among other journals and magazines. He is a library director in Kansas.
