Death’s Footsteps

This is the fifth and final installment of Nina MacLaughlin’s Novemberance column, which has run every Wednesday this month. 

Sharon Harper, Germany, mise en scene. 1997. Courtesy the New York Public Library Digital Collections.

Some weeks ago, before the first frost, before the days got dark in the late afternoon, I took a walk in an unfamiliar place. The dirt trail gave way to a narrow planked walkway flanked on both sides by high grass and brambles. It smelled like late fall, that earthy vinegar stink of rotting leaves. To breathe in the damp and leafy woods-floor smell is to breathe in decay. It’s the fertile, fecund smell of compost, of farms, hay, ammonia, manure; there’s the fermenting yeasty tang of beer. It’s the smell of humification: a word that sounds more like the process of making someone.