‘66 Maple Court’
— Reneé Bibby
There are many things to enjoy in Meghan Lamb’s essay, but perhaps my favorite is her alchemy of scents. She maps elements of sorrow, disrepair, and age to their time and place-specific smells in a feat of literary aromachology. Smells are part of the invisible boundaries that outline our lives.
And even if you got a little lost—ignored the streets, ignored the signs—there was the smell that said, distinctively, something is wrong. The veal packing plant that smelled like everything you might imagine it would smell like.
We may not know the smell of a veal packing plant, but don’t we all know those invisible boundaries of life that are demarked only by a subtle or sometimes powerful shift in scents? Lamb doesn’t rely solely on olfactory experiences to move the story forward, but more so than anyone I’ve read before, Lamb uses scent as an impactful mechanism to reveal the emotional experiences of her narrator, making her narrative visceral and intense in an incredibly delightful way.