the smell of winter approaching

Today is such a "classic" November day.

I'm sitting at home, watching it snow, and listening to the guys cut up deer in the porch. They're laughing and chatting, and stuffing sausage. They're still wearing camo & green and they smell like hunting. They've singlehandedly downed 3 pots of coffee, and are working on a fourth.

It brings back so many memories of being a child, and running through my grandparents' basement while my mom and my aunt wrapped meat in brown butcher paper. My grandpa used to be in charge of sausage making -- he'd mix pounds and pounds of meat on a big white table covered in plastic, adding spices and tasting the raw meat until it was right. He used to dangerously stuff his hand into the grinder to feed more meat down into the sausage casing, and my dad would come down the stairs with plastic spatulas so that he wouldn't accidentally get his fingers caught. (I think he did, one day.)

Ah, yes. What a day. Meat into hamburger, into roasts, into sausage, into packages of stew meat.

It smells like the coming of winter. Pre-winter has a smell. (I don't know if you knew that already.) It's different than the smell of cold. Pre-winter involves the cold smell of living in the country - the dead smell of leaves & the smell of truck exhaust. It also smells like gun powder and raw meat.

(wow. I think that makes me a hick.
anyway.)

The porch smells good to me. It smells like good times, and family.
And the coming of winter.