After the Rain

It's a city of unexpected smells, after the rain. Yesterday afternoon, a stiff breeze came in off the ocean and the air picked up the scent of wet leaves and manure, a sudden earthiness, something rich and rotting. I remember writing to Matt years ago about Cairo, about its vivid decay. This was not that, but there's a kind of irony in being reminded of the vitality of things by rotting maple leaves. At the park, teams of young boys pitched and tacked through a soccer game, their parents on the sidelines in old down jackets or second sweaters. The wind blew in from the west, lofted the freeway's low murmur somewhere east, and you could stand on the sidelines and feel as though you were in a different place.

I woke this morning to a shaft of sunlight through a pane of the glass, and it was as though in passing through the streaked dust of the window the light was thickened, thrown about the walls of my room. Driving north on Lincoln on my way to the beach, the tracked sides of the Santa Monica Mountains were open in front of me. But turning left on Ocean Park and cresting the rise at 7th Street to see the sea for the first time, any thought of the mountains left me. The wide curve of the Bay, the green of new growth in the park beside the sand, and the beach still untracked by footprints since the rain of two days previous. Such a strange thing, to walk across sand without footprints here, smooth braids of sand between the parking lot and the sea.

Walking back from the beach later that afternoon, I passed by old bungalows with glassed-in porches and white bookshelves thick with books. Through the windows of one, you could see the feet of a man propped up reading the Sports section of the New York Times. In another, you could see the house's shallow depth, the lip of a kitchen sink, the curve of a dining room table.

It was all very quiet and thick with light.