UNCOMMON SCENTS

The cusp of April/May in New York City is seasoned by foliage... in the parks, on the most unexpected streets where gutters are stalked by rats and vermin, garbage spillage is a constant... the breathtaking arcades of pink and white could be staging a coronation.  Central Park is at its gala-finest... And then, the pink and white rain of petals. But summer is coming... 

My country friends send me photos of their blooming lilac bushes. This seems sort of a Mother's Day reminder; while mine loved the color yellow, lilacs surrounded our house, grew in profusion without coaxing to touch the second-story and enter through open windows. Their sweetness was almost overpowering... they brought wasps and bees... the cuttings downstairs were overkill.  

I've always thought children, like dogs, have incredibly sensitive noses.  Young teenagers are beginning to discover scents-- their own, their peers', the kind that comes in a bottle.  Home memories are so often olfactory... people's houses had a characteristic scent-- our kitchen, the faintest buttery ghost of piecrust and cinnamon... it permeated the house, like perfume.  

My mother rarely wore perfume, although she had a collection of seductive bottles on her vanity-- for some reason they had to be French: Chanel, Arpège, Givenchy, Guerlain.  I've written before about playing with these... the exotic bottles in their boxes and velvet casings... the prisms from the lamp-crystals making rainbows on the ceiling.  I experimented by pouring them together, mixing them.  I was banished to my room for weeks.

My older sister who had precocious boy-experience wore Shalimar. We'd lie on the bed on spring nights like tonight, when we shared a room, and the scent of lilacs mixed with her perfume is as vivid a memory as her fascinating stories about boys-- their hair, their bodies and their faces.  Boys in middle school smelled like Old Spice and Canoe-- English Leather.  It was awful to me.  Some of them put stuff in their hair... 

In 1970 I thought I fell in love with an older boy.  I was 16; he was 23 and had been to Vietnam.  His body was ripped and tan, his hair was long and streaked with what looked like gold.  His eyes were blue and his teeth were crooked.  He was bad; he flirted with my mother and she warned me.  I was a toy, she said;  he'll chew you up and spit out the bones... but that only made it worse.  I lost sleep, I fantasized... I played Van Morrison over and over... Astral Weeks... Free... we went to concerts... he drove a Karmann Ghia that smelled of patchouli and hash. 

Patchouli.  All through the 1970's; I can almost smell it on old photographs.  My great young loves all used it like an aphrodisiac. Patchouli and leather, carseats, grassy lawns, bedsheets and sleeping bags... 

The first sign of Covid for me was the anosmia.  I had a bottle of bleach, was trying to disinfect my guitar and equipment I'd had on a crowded, infected pre-quarantine subway and realized I could stick my nose in the bottle... and smell nothing.  Even my doctor, mid-March 2020, was baffled.  It went on.. and on... for weeks and weeks.  Nothing.  Food was strange, coffee was terrible.  I thought I could taste grapes, or I imagined I could... but everything else was dull and wooden.  After several months bad smells-- rotting garbage, burned food-- began to process as this strange ginger-cookie scent.  It was weird.  I was grieving, losing friend after friend-- isolated.  I walked in the park... no lilacs, no roses, no spring rain moist-earth grassy fragrance.  Nothing.  Mother's Day was without joy.

My 12-string guitar, as if in pandemic sympathy, imploded.  In early summer I borrowed Alan's Taylor... I carried it home with the broken handle I knew so well... it was heavy, that case... it took a few days for me to have the courage to open it... and when I did, there it was... the scent of Alan-- absolute and vivid, in the room.. like a genie from a bottle.  I cried.  I took it out and played Walk Away Renée, the way he used to... in D.  After I played for a while, I put it back in the case... but the scent was on me... the sense of Alan.  

For many months I had this souvenir.  I took it out at 3 AM nearly every night; I wrote songs, I remembered, I cried sometimes... I talked to him.  At a certain time, it lost its magic.  My 12-string was repaired and I returned the Taylor which traveled to Virginia in a car. I began to recover my olfactory sense, but like my life, things were not the same.  My coffee still doesn't resonate, try as I do to sample different beans and roasts.  But I can smell my neighbor's brew at 6 AM when I am still awake playing my restored 12-string.  I'm not sure which neighbor it is but I am sure they are awake and brewing.  

As for me, I can now smell the lilacs both in the park and in my mind. Today I was in a shop and I heard 'Me and Mrs. Jones', my mother's favorite song from the 1970's, when men still flirted with her and her dreams went beyond kitchen narratives. Today I am so much older than she was at that moment in time... when I bought her the record so she could play it over and over.  I could not stop the tears.  While I have been a mother for thirty-three years, it will always be her holiday and it will always smell of lilacs.