Football season

It's hot today, but:

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 that wool, whether in the
lapels of a jacket or the nap of a sweater, seems to yield when the cloudless
fall sky like the blue bell of a vacuum lifts toward itself the glad exhalations
of all things. This fragrance, so faint and flirtatious on those afternoon walks
through the dry leaves, would be banked a thousandfold on the dark slop of the
stadium when, Friday nights, we played football in the city.

- John Updike "In Football Season"


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(image: Po)