Circle of scent

Sometime in 1979 or 1980 - I think - I moved from Los Angeles back to New York City, leaving the hills and the sea and the vast glorious vistas (there were some clear days then) for a small granite and concrete island. There were many reasons for this move, big adult professioonal reasons, but the real reasons were scent and loss. I had found a perfect apartment in Burbank, a small loft above a garage, full of light, and made application to move into it. It needed work, so it was cheaper than the house I had been living in (which as a now former member of Manhattan Transfer I could no longer afford) and I had recovered just enough from my car accident to handle the stairs. I wanted that apartment. Longed for it. Dreamed of it. I imagined living like a bird at tree-branch level, in the breeze, in the light. It would be my nest.

I lost it to a male renter who had carpentry skills. I was spit out of Eden.

DIsconsolate, I went to NY to visit friends. In Riverside Park, the maples were reaching their summer splendor: the leaves were as big and as green as they could possibly be, and that is how they smelled, too, big and green and full of juice, a wet smell. That wet green scent had perfumed my childhood, and it smelled like home. That noseful made me an Easterner again.So I returned to L.A. to pack and arrange the move.

The Manhattan ground-floor apartment I found and rented was a triumph of form over function. I was seduced by architectural detail into moving to a really bad neighborhood. For the next two years, I was afraid almost all the time. With little money, I was poor, too. My block was only quiet on Sunday, when the huge post office was closed and the tunnel traffic light. Only if it rained did the street smell good. Rain on Sunday was a gift - windows could be opened, and the soul could drink.

Several blocks south of that apartment, on the way to the laundromat, was a flower stand, which I found with my nose, in the spring. As I was walking by, I was suddenly enveloped by a curtain of sweetness in the air that made me gasp. Lilacs. There was a big white plastic 5-gallon bucket full of lilacs, full full full of lilacs. An older man was arranging them, adding even more. I asked the price and bought a single branch. Laundry would wait. He showed me how to lengthen the life of the blossoms by fraying the ends of the woody stems with a hammer blow, and he added another branch without charging me. I took the lilacs back to that apartment, and placed them in beautiful vase I had brought from California. Over the next few hours the scent of those purple flowers gradually unfolded and spread throughout the apartment, and I remember a feeling of deep relief.

Yesterday I smelled lilacs in the city again, at the flower shop down the street. I took them home to my fifth-floor apartment, where my windows open into a treetop. As I hammered on the branch ends, and then put them in that same vase, I felt that past moment of unfurling and relief as if it was happening again, felt the kindness of the long-ago flower seller, felt that same saving sweetness.

Here is why I am writing about this: at the touch of scent doors fly open and  time-travel is simple.  The dogs are right, and they know it: one has only to follow one's nose.

Comments

[Enrique]

I never thought have details of his life for my this is like a book that little by little I am reading and discovering things that he never imagines to manage to know. Thank you for these emotions, This is wonderful.

[John Svendsen]

Doors do fly open. Time travel indeed. In my daily work at a historical museum, we appreciate the evocative power of smell. The fascinating part is we never know what worlds are opened, what times we will be taken to. I may guide a much bejeweled, overly tanned, blasé cruise ship tourist grandmother through our 18th century salt cod warehouse and think I’m giving her some insight into the cultural and economic history of our little section of Scandinavia. But after five minutes the smell that 250 years of curing and packing fish has left in the walls has her telling me about the years she as a young woman worked in a cannery in Monterey. The other ladies in the group ran out because of the "horrible" smell, she was transported back to a time when her life was very different, but judging from her smiles, also very sweet.

I know I could relate episode after episode from my own life based on memories generated by certain smells: the dank smell of water pooled on concrete, new mown lawns on a moist summer evening, blooming orange groves, sweaty horse, sage desert, the mixture of tobacco, chocolate, fruit and newsprint of the old kiosks in Norway, Gitane cigarettes, a bag of fresh croissants and on and on. Even without a dog’s nose, we could all probably write our biographies as a series of smells if we thought about it enough. And thanks for reminding me that the pesky lilac trees I just spent two days trimming in my overgrown garden will soon be filling said garden with their lovely, fragrant gift.