… the pie just happened to be there at exactly the same moment
she came to drape her head over the arm of the sofa
and say good morning.

“Her father had taught her about hands.
About a dog’s paws.
Whenever her father was alone with a dog in a house he would lean over and smell the skin at the base of its paw. This, he would say, as if coming away from a brandy snifter, is the greatest smell in the world!
A bouquet! Great rumours of travel! 
She would pretend disgust, but the dog’s paw was a wonder:
the smell of it never suggested dirt.
It’s a cathedral! her father had said,
so-and-so’s garden, that field of grasses, a walk through cyclamen–
a concentration of hints of all the paths the animal had taken during the day.”

― Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

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