Now that we have ways of transmitting pictures and sounds over long distances with relative ease, I wonder when we will be able to share smells? I guess we're stuck with the entirely inadequate medium of language!
The smell I wanted to share with you was the amalgam of scents I encountered one day on my way home from work this week. We'd gotten a decent rain during the afternoon which my students and I had enjoyed, first, by hearing it pound on the tin roof, then by watching it blur the view through the window, and finally by going out and feeling its effects on the air in the covered patio.
By the time I was riding my bike home, the rain had been done for at least half an hour. The sun was out, but low in the sky, and the ambient temperature was comfortable. Post-rain smells are relished around the world, I think, but it's amazing how different that post-rain smell can be. I was conscious of that as I rode along the riverbank, thinking of how the first rains in California smell after the long hot summer.
Although this is also early rain after a season without rain, it's a different smell. There's something tropical in the smell here, even though the landscape may look similar to California's golden dry grasses and gray-green trees. I felt, as I was riding, that I was smelling the potential of the thick green foliage that will come with a few more rains.
Probably the key difference is the amount of humidity in the air which, combined with temperatures in the 80s (F), bring a different smell. When I think of that first rain in California, I think of a sort of dustiness relieved, rain dropping into hot dry air and transforming the ground and the air into something clean, clear and fresh. Here, I felt that the rain was evoking tropical fucundity, rotting wood, tangling vines, water sitting in curved leathery fallen leaves.
As I rode through a small park area, I also got the thick heady scent of frangipani, whose white blossoms covered the trees and littered the ground beneath. It infused the other post-rain smells in an almost intoxicating steam.
I wish I could send you this smell.
Bittersweet
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Eyal and I always knew that it would be difficult building a family from
two different countries. It is just now, however, that we have to really
put that ...
12 years ago
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2 comments:
I associate the smell of 'ozone' with post-rain here in Sonoma County. But I remember smelling the same basic odor in Malawi but tinged with a sweetness that wasn't present in California. More tangy here. But smells are interesting and how limited we are in describing them. And how smelling a particular odor can evoke memories from long ago--at least with me.
Bill
I think the smell-memory link is well-established, even scientifically. I don't remember exactly, but there's a stronger connection in the brain between memories and smell than between memories and any other sense. I think!
That's why I think aromatherapy seems both right and wrong. Surely smell can be a powerful therapy, but it seems that most (at least many) odor-associations would be personal, not universal. Hmmm.
My strongest smell flashbacks are always unidentified scents that bring me right back to childhood visits to my grandma's house in Orange County. The temperature, humidity and salinity are often part of that smell-package.
I like hearing about your memories of Malawi, Bill!
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