The vanilla scent of lilies wafts in an open kitchen window, announcing their presence.
And within that scent lie memories of sitting on porches — that of my home and my friends’ homes — while reading stories or making up stories or watching the cars go by. Dusk filters into the evenings of my memories, and somehow I still feel like I’m 12 years old again
Sometimes, a garden reveals its presence in the night. Yes, even in the dark the white flowers gently glow in moonlight, echoing the stars above. But I’m unlikely to stand outdoors in the dark for a long enough time to let my eyes adjust. The mosquitoes are legion.
The smell of rain on hot, dusty streets brings me back to age 21, when I was living in the big City on a street without grass and one tree, worrying about rent checks and a crummy economy. The crackling electric smell of a thunderstorm reminds me of age 14, when I was out on the roof of my friends’ house, watching a storm (kids don’t do this: the collateral damage from parents, let alone the danger, is not worth the excitement).
Scent can be as powerful as a time warp in a movie. It can be a simple reminder to enjoy a cool breeze on a hot night. It’s cold and fresh as fir branches under snow or warming like cinnamon and vanilla on baking day. Of all the senses, the sense of smell is the most ephemeral.
What scents “send you” down memory lane?
Are those Casa Blanca lilies?!? They are my favorite, but don’t bloom here ’til much closer to summer’s end, or at least early August. They are simply gorgeous though, sight and scent together and always an occasion.
The other scent that gets me, sends me time tripping, is the smell of sweet allyssum. It seems to me that my great-grandma must’ve had plenty of it blooming in her garden on Wood Ridge Ave, because I get these really dim, flickering memories of her garden whenever I smell it on a hot summer morning.
The Gardener is looking that up.
One of my strongest memory smells is of hot water running into my grandmother’s bath. The water in her town came from a local reservoir and it had it’s own subtle smell. Every summer I stayed with her for two weeks and it was a wonderful time.
glad you sent in a “memory smell”.
Wondering if there was sulphur or some other mineral near the source
of your Grandmother’s water.
Interesting…
After a little delay, while The Gardener looked up the records, I’ve been given the name of the lilies in the photo: Muscadet.
Ah, a lovely lily itself, to be sure! Someday, my garden will have one (or two) of everything!!
I’ll send you my memories associated with smells I wrote about the same time you wrote this…
I used to love climbing out my third-floor window onto the second-floor roof and looking down the hill at all the rooftops and treetops. I’d pick moss off the roof and throw it into our blue spruce.
The only memory smell I can think of is salt water. It’s been overwritten a bit since then, but we used to go to the beach a lot when my grandmother lived in Brooklyn. I guess I really mean “beach”, which is made up of salt water, and sand in the sun, and maybe some dying jellyfish and drying seaweed.
Hi, Naomi! Glad to hear from you.
Salt water definitely has a different smell than lake water (even if the lake has clasping leaf pondweed in it, which looks like seaweed to those who haven’t seen seaweed anywhere other than a sushi plate).
Kind of glad I’m not the only one who found the different perspective from a roof interesting.