Morning Odors

This morning I rode my bike up to Manhattan Avenue to take some money out for laundry.
Riding past North 7th I caught the tell-tale early morning whiff of urban population.
It was a moment of reckoning for me as it reminded me of the fact that my small neighborhood is not so small anymore.
I stepped into Citibank and was nearly knocked over by the unmistakable smell of the freshly cleaned seedy motel.
There are these little magical pockets of serenity in Greenpoint, both above and below McGuinness where the streets are straight, the brownstones pretty and people are outside in the morning spraying down the side walk with hoses, creating that delicious smell of wet, summer concrete.
Not four blocks away from one of those pockets I passed through an industrial area where everything smells like dust. Wood dust, metal dust, resin dust, foam dust.
There was a sanitation specialist from the city powerwashing some graffiti off the side of a building. That has a whole smell I had yet to place in the pantheon of smells. It is something brackish yet plastic. A new smell for me.
The laundromat smelled like laundry, but not the winter laundry that is pungent and draws one in with the promise of heat (a kind of baked bread smell) but the summer laundry that is nearly imperceptible, yet leaves you with an unconscious freshness.
As I stepped into my apartment I realized it smells like a dog.