Blog #9: Bottling the world

The act of smelling something, anything, is remarkably like the act of thinking. Immediately at the moment of perception, you can feel the mind going to work, sending the odor around from place to place, setting off complex repertories through the brain, polling one center after another for signs of recognition, for old memories and old connection.

– Lewis Thomas

The subtleties of nature are so vast, so easy to overlook if you're not wide-eyed and aware.

Air is one that has always caught my attention, no matter what else my mind is revolving around.  The scents it carries in its stillness or in its sweeping winds can indicate so much.  A campfire or barbeque bleeding through the air from a house down the street, freshly mowed grass, a snow about to fall, even smaller changes occurring daily that we are not aware of.  Do flowers opening and budding give off small perfumes of their own like little bursts of cloud? Does water smell different as it thaws out of a freeze? Rain has its own particular smell, but what about when it mixes with the steel of a bridge, mulch freshly laid in a garden, when it lands on rotting plant life does it mask the smell of decay or enhance it with its wetness?  It's incredible that such small things can bring back distinct emotional connections to another time, to childhood, to a feeling from an experience many years passed.  Nature is constantly a cycle of renewal and reminder, connecting us in our lives through the seasons, through the scents they bring.  Even memories of a completely different lifetime in a person, with different loves and different things that filled those days, are connected in their own way to everything else that has happened in that season.  Laced with similar smells, sights, sounds of the world, our lives have another story-line other than chronologically- our seasonal lives take on through-lines all their own.

Walking to the pond this week, the air isn't much different in terms of temperature, but Spring is coming and it is tangible in the wind.  The particular chilliness of Spring weather has a distinctly fresher, newer smell than the same degree of temperature in Winter.  All around I feel my skin open up to breathe into its pores the arrival of the season, and I find myself wishing as I do many times a year that the smell could be bottled and brought out at will.  I suppose, though, that some of the magic and anticipation of these changes would be lost.  Instant gratification is much less lustrous and rewarding than the suspense, the looking-forward, the joyful surprise of walking out of your front door one day and suddenly you smell the Springtime.

I wonder what it is that causes these distinct seasonal smells?  Obviously it's through the different activity in the world that occurs at those particular times of year...but what would the ingredients be for each bottled seasons? What causes the smell of musty Autumn like beautiful burning wood, or what wafts up from the raw insides of squash when freshly opened? Would Spring only include fresh soil, budding greens of grass and leaves, or do the inside of young sapling branches have a distinct odor that escapes through the bark? Does the birth of all the animal young sift into the air and bring the newness of life that smells like the top of a baby's head or puppy breath?  What about the scent of human life wafting out the screens of windows open in all the houses? Is Winter mainly made up of the smell of snow and smoke and fire through chimneys, or is what we think to be the smell of snow actually the amassed smell of the absence of plant life and many animals, plus the combination of all the puffs of cold clouds that escape out of human mouths?  Summer brings the hot, sometimes humid, air full of opened grass blades, outdoor cooking, vegetation rotting and fecund in the higher temperatures, but what about the smell of millions of children's tennis shoe rubber slapping on blacktops or the scent of mud pies dug from the earth and laid out in the hot sun as a pretend picnic for kids and their bug friends?  Fireflies must give off some sort of smell because how can something so beautiful and interesting as a bug that carries its own light not give off something lovely? Or dogs sweating beneath the shade of a yard tree, tomatoes ripening in the sun, smell of skin and jeans baking in the summer sun on the body of a farmer tending his land?  What about all the ones unknown to us, things our noses aren't sharp enough for, that only the animals can smell?


If there were a bottle of Schenley pond from just this one day, this would be the list of ingredients:

Spring fresh air, pond water reacting to the warmer temperature, ducks and geese- their wet feathers, their food opening in their beaks, their waste, wet webbed feet, bike tires on asphalt trails, bugs and worms coming alive in the ground and moving the earth around, earth smell wafting upwards in reaction to that movement, car tires and exhaust sifting in the air above, faint scent of the first scratchy grasses unbrowning and new ones poking through, smell of the birds returning, leftover decay of wet leaves flattened by feet and weather, distinct smell of wet plants around the pond- different from that of frozen plants, smell of bird song, squirrel claws scraping against bark, small blooms of perfume from the couple small flowers and buds on weeds blossuming, a small red ivy leaf, litter that peppers the wooded trails around me, nest smell of those being gathered and constructed, my chilled and bare feet on the concrete steps, hints at the animals ripening into their heats, preparing for mating and reproduction, smell of wind blowing through the steel bridge to my left, smell of my favorite tree sucking in the air and breathing out a warmer, fresher oxygen, my coffee through the sipping hole, my shampoo and perfume mixing in the air, bluer sky and a dash of puffy white clouds.