Bi-Weekly Topic for April 1, 2004
Smell and Place
By ChickenLil
Hello to all - It's April 1 and I came to see what the Ecotone Wiki is about. I "met" Cassandra recently, because I found her weblog to be resonant with my own, and we even started our blogs the same week a year ago, just before the start of the war. I think my blogging has helped to keep me sane through this past difficult, challenging year, in which - among world events and personal changes - my husband and I finally sold our home and land in New Mexico, which we had spent twenty years caring for...despite the powerful oppositional forces in a transitional neighborhood. Our family grew up and was gone. It took a long time to get out of there, and at times was a wrenching experience. I feel freed by the release, and do not wish to be back, but the memories persist and I try to keep my focus on the beauty, love and healing that were present in that place.
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The first year we were delighted by the old apple orchard next door. At least forty huge old trees wore a wild profusion of blossom in the spring. Up close, they were marvelous - white, pink and pale green, multiplied by thousands, adorning the gnarly, unpruned fairy-trees--with a sweetness almost unimaginable.
Our first April there, we had a baby ...our youngest son, Max, was born on my birthday in the upstairs of that house. I remember rocking him by the door open to the deck, enjoying his perfection, and the scent of the apple blossoms wafting in the breezes.
We planted a dozen honeysuckles along a latilla pole fence, and Robert watered them faithfully. While this vine grows like a weed other places, in New Mexico even a weed sometimes needs nurturing to get started. The irrigation ditch ran along the side of the drive, and eventually the honeysuckle and Virginia Creeper and the trumpet vines grew like a jungle, fulfilling a plan and a dream that someday the view of our neighbor's messy yard would be concealed by vines and flowers.
The smell of honeysuckle will always bring me back to my own backyard, and as I stood there inhaling that fragrance, I would remember being a child of about 10 years old, delighting in the honeysuckle in the woods *down the creek* where I grew up in Pennsylvania. Especially in the early evening when the hummingbird-moths would flutter along the fence, the perfume would rise like a dream, and I would nearly swoon with the power of it.
Some sadness wells up with the beauty of these smells, the sense of loss and the memory of family and home that was always mixed with turmoil and pain. It is reflected in the landscape.
We walked the field together our last day, Robert and I and Max. We pondered the empty house, remembering. Twenty years had passed in the wink of an eye. So many stories! In the garden, father and son broke down in tears, we all hugged and the pain seared us; the son said, "I love you - thank you " to his father, who drank the words in like a draught of cool water and wept. As the December sun dropped suddenly behind us, we drove away.
We didn't know, weren't told, but it wouldn't have mattered anyway, that beginning the day after Christmas the huge old evergreens in the front would be chopped down and hauled off, after standing guard at least fifty years on that spot. I was shocked but accepting, as though the sentinels of those dark trees were Robert and I, standing watch, and now we were gone, our shadows never to cool and protect again.
Then, when the fence was taken out, and the roses, the lilacs, the trumpet vines and creeper and the honeysuckle torn from the ditch by the roots, I could only wonder why. It was as if we had held back the inevitable plunder and death by our insistence that beauty was worth something...worth protecting. But we were used to it by now.
Smells that will remind me of that place came to include burning garbage, burning cottonwood, road exhaust, diesel fumes from beeping forklifts and recreational bulldozing. A poignant rush of feeling at home comes with the particular scent of green chile roasting, wafting in the air of late summer as I sit in the shade of the mulberry tree, shucking ears of corn.
The apple orchard, so laden in the fall and reeking of vinegar, as the apples tumbled and rotted on the ground, was mowed down within the first year by chainsaws and replaced eventually by a grey house. The branches were piled high in a summer bonfire, and burned. Several of the trees were so big and their roots so deep, planted by the grandfather of the current owners seventy years ago, that the trees sprang up again from the roots, anew.
Source: http://chickenlil.blogspot.com/2004_04_01_chickenlil_archive.html
Earthworm Perfume
By Feathers of Hope (Numenius)
An entry for the Ecotone Wiki topic on smell and place.
There is such a thing -- honest. Amy Stewart, author of an excellent new book on earthworms and their achievements, writes in her book tour blog about discovering this fragrance:
Finally I pulled off the cap and sprayed it into the air. It hit me, instantly familiar. Worms. No doubt about it. It was the smell of dirt and rotten leaves and compost piles, and also the faint scent of skin, worm skin. I don’t know how else to describe it. It was just vaguely -- invertebrate.
The creator of this scent is Christopher Brosius, co-founder of a company called Demeter Fragrances, whose line of fragrances include many evocative of place. One, called Holy Water, comes from the smell of an old Norman church in England. Others in their list include bamboo, funeral home, New Zealand (by special request for the premiere of The Two Towers), and the most popular one of all, dirt.
As for Earthworm, Brosius says that the scent is "surprisingly popular...It sells at smaller upscale shops with a very sophisticated clientele."
Posted by Numenius at April 1, 2004 11:03 PM
Comments
The following is from the A Word A Day listserv, and seems to fit so well here ...
petrichor (PET-ri-kuhr) noun
The pleasant smell that accompanies the first rain after a dry spell.
[From petro- (rock), from Greek petros (stone) + ichor (the fluid that is
supposed to flow in the veins of the gods in Greek mythology). Coined by
researchers I.J. Bear and R.G. Thomas.]
"Petrichor, the name for the smell of rain on dry ground, is from oils
given off by vegetation, absorbed onto neighboring surfaces, and
released into the air after a first rain."
Matthew Bettelheim; Nature's Laboratory; Shasta Parent (Mt Shasta,
California); Jan 2002.
"But, even in the other pieces, her prose breaks into passages of lyrical
beauty that come as a sorely needed revifying petrichor amid the pitiless
glare of callousness and cruelty."
Pradip Bhattacharya; Forest Interludes; Indianest.com; Jul 29, 2001.
Posted by: P. at April 6, 2004 08:56 AM
Source: http://www.magpienest.org/feathersofhope/archives/2004/04/01/earthworm_perfum.html
Warm Pine Needles
By Feathers of Hope (Pica)
July in the Gredos mountains, west of Madrid . . . June in Idyllwild . . . May in South Carolina . . . August in the Landes near Bordeaux.
When pine needles have been sitting on the ground, piled up for a while, and get warmed by the sun of the late afternoon, and that languid time and scent is punctuated by occasional languid birdcall, when the breeze rustles the tall pines overhead, then is the best time, the best place, for a nap.
For the Ecotone Wiki's joint post on Smell and Place.
Posted by Pica at April 2, 2004 09:42 PM
Comments
So happy to see Idyllwild among your examples! And there's a spot on the Berkeley campus, a path that runs down from Dwinelle, along Strawberry Creek, to Oxford St. Runs through a pine grove, always so fragrant when the weather warms up. I loved riding my bike through there but never though to stop and take a nap. Thanks for the memory!
Posted by: Doc Rock at April 3, 2004 09:09 AM
Smell and Place
By Beginner's Mind
All around us, but particularly out back in the woods there has been a strong smell of wet spring. It's a mixture of the odor of fresh mud, with a strong earthy, humus smell from the damp covering of previous years' leaves. Usually there is the sweet scent of pine, especially in the summer.
Allergies and viruses
By P.
Allergies and viruses have held my nose prisoner for most of my adult life; I don't smell very well (no one will comment on whether I smell good, and I only hope that however badly I smell, I don't smell bad).
But between the mold-and-house-dust season and the pollen season, I sometimes get a furlough. Unfortunately, I notice mainly the strong smells then -- I go from durance to vile. This is the season when the farmer spreads stored manure on fields, making a stink that would gag a moose; when dead critters finally begin to decay; when melting snow overloads the septic tanks; when we return from vacation to an olfactory welcome from the refrigerator (who knew rice would rot so quickly!).
And now is the time for all well-digested canine meals to come out from their discreet blanket of snow and hide in the littered grass, awaiting the unwary foot. I'm told the huntsman calls it "scumble."
Years ago, I used to cut wild daisies to bring to my wife. As the little bundle grew on my passenger seat (I took only a few from each cluster), a smell grew in my car. "Oops," I would think, and absently scrape my shoes. Come to find out it was the daisies themselves -- they're pollinated by cluster flies or one of those other barnyard hangers-on with unspeakable habits, and mimic, well ... you know. I guess that explains why you only get daisylike mums in florists' stores.