A Whiff of Honeysuckle

The aroma of honeysuckle is in the air, and every year I want to hold onto it, to have it close at hand so I can inhale it whenever I walk out the door. I dream of rooting a sprig of the vine, planting it, and training it to tumble over my back fence.

This year I came close to doing that, was even scouting out potential plant "donors." Then I came to my senses. Introduce another invasive species when our yard is full of knotweed, stilt grass and bamboo? I must be crazy.

Honeysuckle is a wild thing, after all, and it's best left where it is, mostly in the park or common land. A whiff may be all I get. But sometimes, a whiff is enough.

A Benediction

The first thing I notice is the scent. The air is perfumed, mid-May incarnate. Early honeysuckle? I don't think so. Viburnum perhaps?  I inhale as I walk, which supercharges each step. 

The next thing I notice is the mud. It's been only a few days since I last walked in the woods, but it's rained hard since then, and paths that were packed are now spongy, pliable.  My boots leave an impression. 

The stream is gurgling. The forest has greened and expanded with the much-needed moisture. It has moved up and out. It holds me as I walk, sifts its stillness down, a gift, a benediction.  

The Scent of Cold

The winter world is scrubbed clean, scoured by wind and weather to reveal pockmarked roads and blown-grass fields. It is silent, but for the drone of a distant leaf blower.

It carries with it a whiff of cold, not the metallic taste of snow but something earthier and more elemental. Perhaps it is the absence of scent — but I think not. It's more like the presence of an aroma I've known since I was a child. 

Inhaling it prompts a near-involuntary physical reactions, a tensing of the muscles. Yesterday as I walked, I worked to keep my shoulders from bunching up against the chill, concentrating instead on the beauty of the afternoon. 

It worked ... most of the time.

The Power of Scent

Yesterday, on my way back from a walk, I caught a whiff of manure from a passing truck. Turns out, the truck was turning into my neighbors' driveway where for a couple of hours the lawn was aerated and fertilized.

As a result, I spent the day inhaling whiffs of the barnyard, a scent I associate more with the farm than the suburb. 

It wasn't unpleasant, not after I got used to it. In fact, it made me think of afternoons spent interviewing farmers in Cambodia or Malawi or other places around the world, places where roosters crowed and pigs wallowed and shy children peeked at me from behind the leaves of a banana tree.

I miss those trips, the golden sunrises, the purple twilights, but I'm grateful that yesterday, for a few hours, a whiff of the barnyard brought them back to me. 

Smell of Burning Leaves

Yesterday's walk through the fading light of a late fall afternoon reminded me of what has been missing from the season. I caught a whiff of it when I rounded the corner. It was that autumn elixir — the smell of burning leaves.

Its source was unknown — and even if it wasn't, I would protect its identity, since the practice must surely be illegal. In fact, I hesitate to mention it at all with California burning.

But neither illegality nor political incorrectness can erase the fact that I love this scent, that it fills me with both poignance and peace, an unlikely pairing that takes me right back to childhood.

I would have been playing all day in that scent, would have been jumping in those leaves, in big crisp piles of them before they were set to smolder. And soon I would be walking back into my mother's kitchen, not my own. And it was the promise of that warmth and closeness that contrasted so perfectly with the lonely fragrance of ash and oak.

This, along with the scent of tobacco wafting from the big auction houses on the west end of town,  were the "smell-scapes" of my Kentucky childhood.  I don't smell either of them anymore.  But they're there. All it takes is the whiff of burning leaves to bring them back.

Freshened and Fragrant

Woke up to cooler air this morning, and the return of ... aromas. I could smell the grass lush and green as I stepped off the bus and waited to cross 18th Street. I could smell the damp in the puddles that lingered from yesterday's rain and the perfume of flowers freshened by the dousing.

Great heat drains energy — and, as I've been realizing lately, it also drains scent. It leaves a dusty and less olfactorily rich world.

But now, after our recent rain showers, we have fresh air and fragrance — a bountiful combination, a feast for all the senses.

True Freshness

Can freshness be measured? I'm talking about the cooler air eked from darkness and dawn. It can be, meteorologically speaking. It's a matter of dew point and temperature and wind speed. But what can't be measured is the way it feels on the skin first thing in the morning. The way it revives.

How different it is from the chilled air of refrigerated buildings. Not that I'm complaining. It would be difficult to work with 95+-degree heat and high humidity. I mention it only to point out the difference.

True freshness is an acoustic guitar, a handwritten letter. It holds within itself the aroma of cut grass and moist creek banks and the swirling crescendo of countless cicadas singing. It is full spectrum. And on this mid-July morning, I'm reveling in it.

Wood Smoke

I took a walk last night as the light was fading, the smell of wood smoke in the air. At first I thought I was imagining it. The acrid scent went along well with the slight nip in the air. Was it real? Or was I was so accustomed to the two together that I made it up.

But no, there actually was wood smoke in the air. Neighbors were burning brush in their fire pit — something frowned upon by the home owners association, though you won't catch me telling.

The smell of wood smoke is the aroma of autumn. The only scent more autumnal is the smell of tobacco wafting from the drying barns on Angliana Avenue in Lexington. Barns that have been gone for decades, I believe, along with the tobacco that used to fill them.

Still, wood smoke is an evocative aroma, and one I was happy to get a whiff of last night. It was calming, redolent of campfires and coziness not danger and destruction.

Honeysuckle at Work

The car windows were open, the scent of honeysuckle flowing in with the early morning air. So when I was walking to Metro yesterday, on impulse, I snatched a sprig of the plant and took it to work.

I almost forgot it when I arrived at the office. The stem had gotten wedged in a nether region of my bag, the newspaper and file folders of papers almost burying it.

But it revived when I stuck it in some water, and I stationed it as close to my nose as possible.

All day long the honeysuckle brought the outside in. I would catch a whiff of it when I was on the phone or sending an email, when I was reviewing notes for an article I'm about to write. And every time I would feel my shoulders drop a little in response.

It was a busy day, trying in some ways. The scent of honeysuckle helped me through it.

Perfumed

The soil is rich here in central Kentucky, dark loam that sends forth an incredible profusion of spring blooms.

But what has struck me this visit is not the soil but the air. It is, quite simply, perfumed. I walk the familiar streets inhaling at every turn.

There are great, heavily laden lilac bushes, their flowers just waiting to be sniffed. And then there is another smell in the air. Is it apple blossoms? Spirea?

Whatever it is, it conjures up for me a childhood spent outdoors, and in the spring of the year, those first warm days,  the heady plunge back into that natural life.

So it is not just the current spring I am taking in, but all the springs before.

Scentscape

Walking through a field of clover the other day, I caught a whiff of childhood. The sweetness of the  purple flower mixed with the aroma of cut grass, loamy earth and hot sun. The scents were radiating from below, up past my knees and into my nose.

But there was a time when those smells didn't have as far to travel. A time when I was closer to the ground. We all were.

No wonder, then, that the world was full of fragrance. That we were storing up a lifetime of olfactory memories and triggers, a scentscape.

It was the world, and we were just coming alive to it. And it can be there for us again. Just take a deep breath.

Honeysuckle Season

It isn't just the flowers and new leaves that make May my favorite month, the azealas and the iris. It's the perfumed air. Take a walk in our neighborhood now and you would have to be suffering from a severe head cold or sinus infection to miss the olfactory assault.

The air is literally perfumed. Stroll past the honeysuckle. Deconstruct that scent. For me, it is cool mornings along a Fayette County Lane, out early to pick strawberries. It is a roll-on perfume by Avon that I wore in high school, came in a little tube like Chap-Stick. I thought it marked me as a "natural girl." No Shalimar for me!

Honeysuckle drapes itself over hedges and fence rows. It is an elegant, lithesome plant, willing to grow just about anywhere.  Which is good news for us. Because that means we can smell it on walks through woods or along suburban lanes.

Last night I picked a sprig and bought it home. Now it sits beside the kitchen window. Bringing the outside in.


Photo: GardenLovetoKnow.com

In Search of Scent

I am a woman without a scent. The O De Lancome that suited me fine for half a decade now seems cloying and sharp. I remember when I first wore that perfume; it was during a difficult time of my life, and its lemony, astringent aroma became a scented badge of honor.

I didn't wear it again for years. In between I tried Anias, Anias by Cacherel, a flowery, romantic cologne that arrested me at a counter in the long-since departed Altman's Department Store in Manhattan and wouldn't let me go for years.

Then there was Oscar de la Renta, my stalwart. It sailed me through the busy years of my children's childhoods, when I needed just a splash of something sweet to get me through the day.

After that I went back to O De Lancome. For the memories, you might say. For the invincible way it made me feel.

But I'm out of Lancome and at a crossroads. Will my new fragrance be floral or sophisticated? Light or musky? I need some serious time at a perfume counter. I need to be swept off my feet again. I'm a woman in search of a scent.