Let Me Be Frank With You

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STRANGE FRAGRANCES RIDE THE TWITCHY, wintry air at The Shore this morning, two weeks before Christmas. Flowery wreaths on an ominous sea stir expectancy in the unwary.

It is, of course, the bouquet of large-scale home repair and re-hab. Fresh-cut lumber, clean, white PVC, the lye-sniff of Sakrete, stinging sealants, sweet tar paper, and denatured spirits. The starchy zest of Tyvek mingled with the ocean’s sulfurous weft and Barnegat Bay’s landward stink. It is the air of full-on disaster. To my nose — once practiced in these things — nothing smells of ruin as fragrantly as the first attempts at rescue.

I notice it first at the red light at Hooper Ave., and then again when I gas up my Sonata at the Hess, before heading to the bridge, Toms River to Sea-Clift. Here in the rich gas-station scents, a wintry breeze flitters my hair while my dollars spool along like a slot machine in the gathering December clouds. Breeze has set the silver whirly-gigs to spinning at the Grandly Re-Opened Bed Bath & Beyond at the Ocean County Mall (“Only new bedding can keep us down”). Across its acres of parking, a tenth full at ten A.M., the Home Depot — Kremlin-like, but enigmatically-still-your-friend-in-spite-of-all — has thrown its doors open wide and early. Customers trail out, balancing boxes of new toilet works, new motherboards, new wiring harnesses, shrink-wrapped hinge assemblies, hollow-core doors, an entire front stoop teetering on a giant shopping cart. All is on its way to some still-standing domicile blotto’d by the hurricane — six weeks past, but not lost from memory. Everyone’s still stunned here — quarrelsome, funked, put-upon-but-resolute. All are committed to “coming back.”

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