Sunday, February 6, 2011

A Choir in Autumn


Do you remember a fragrance girls acquire in autumn? 


As you walk beside them after school, they tighten their arms about their books and bend their heads forward to give a more flattering attention to your words, and in the little intimate area thus formed, carved into the clear air by an implicit crescent, there is a complex fragrance woven of tobacco, powder, lipstick, rinsed hair, and that perhaps imaginary and certainly elusive scent of wool, whether in the lapels of a jacket or the nape of a sweater, [that?] seems to yield when the cloudless fall sky like the blue ball of a vacuum lifts toward itself the glad exhalations of all things.
            -In Football Season, Updike

(Photo from a blog about Chapel Hill: http://www.chapelhillmemories.com/pg/2)