Seated on the plush leather couch in her yellow living room, where a rubber plant has grown past its stakes to the ceiling, we discuss food: what was eaten for supper, what pre-packaged find was a success, what in her country of origin is a staple meal-snack-appetizer: “You take tuna and mix it with some mayonnaise and spoon it in the centre of a sliced canned peach. Pêches-au-thon! It’s familiar to everyone in Belgium!”

As I walked the dog over leaves cast to the ground, still and dampened from an earlier light rain, the air smells good and the feeling of coziness makes me want to plan supper; maybe lentil soup with home-made broth and a plate towered high with grilled cheese…

I brought Enzo to the doggy daycare under coral pastel skies, leaving filled-out forms with the woman who remembers him from when I last chanced the experiment a near year ago. Underneath the deodorizers is such a concentrated dog smell that even if I stay only moments in the building’s lobby, I am, hours later self-consciously sniffing my hair to see if this phantom-limb of a smell finds its source somewhere on me, surreptitiously having seeped-in the way a short-haired middle-aged woman once described it when a few high school friends and I were awarded a trip to a pig farm and had to strip and shower before entering and before leaving: “The smell, you cannot wash it away, you just get used to it.”