The Smells of Home

We remember what we see, what we do, what we hear. What a more wonderful thing still it is to remember what we feel, smell and taste.

In Palos Verdes, California there grows among the shoreline cliffs a sort of wild fennel. In the evenings they let go a fragrance something between coffee, chocolate, thai tee, fennel and rain. It's a smell that I associate with California sunsets, a walk down a cliff-side path to a cove below, night-long and moonlit conversations, twinkling ships, and crab-filled tide pools.

Near Monterrey, California lies Jade Cove. The fog here "comes on little cat feet." And then it sits on your chest and wills you to wake up. It's a palpable sensation on your skin, chest and face. It's tactile. And so are the pebbles strewn on the beach. The cliffs are marble-like and don't look too much like jade, but the pebbles hewn from the face of the cliffs and tumbled against one another by the waves, they turn smooth and shiny and bright. And you can pick them up by the handful and feel them run down through your fingers and listen to the ssshhhh sound that the ocean has imbued them with.

Not far from famed Lexington and Concord in Massachusetts, sits (setts/sits) Walden Pond. Wild blueberries line its shores. They're small, blue-gray and intensely sweet. Along the roads in the area you sometimes come across an apple tree. Mostly crab apples, but sometimes something else. Don't know what variety they are, but they're crisp and tangy and flavorful and memorable.

Somewhere between Simi Valley and Thousand Oaks, California likes a series of hiking trails among hills and streams. The vegetation here is hearty and evolved to stand up to hot summers. The ground is dusty and rutted where the water has carved its telltale grooves. In the evenings after work I used to hike these trails. The trailhead started near some houses at the outskirt of town. The trails went away from them and away from the road and away from people and their noises, and toward...silence. The sounds of silence were deafening--swooshing owls, scampering rabbits, buzzing dragonflies, chirping (yes, chirping) frogs, scratchy cicadas, and me. Heart thumping, deep breathing. One deep breath. There's a smell unique to the arid hills of southern California that I've never smelled anywhere else. It's like the smell of rain on dirt, only more earthy and more intense, more powerful. Powerful enough to change how I feel. My folks grew up in arid hill country and the way the smell affects me makes me wonder if there isn't such a thing as genetic memory. I smelled it last weekend on an out-of-town trip. It was wonderful, heady, intoxicating.

There's a hill on the outskirts of New Haven, Connecticut with a winding road that leads to a sort of observation deck at the top. The road was closed the day my friend and I approached it on my motorcycle. There was a chain strung between two posts around which I just barely managed to squeeze my bike. Like waves off the bow of a ship we split the leafy waters of foot-thick New England autumn foliage. Reds and yellows and golden browns and a whole unspoiled road of it just for us. That was a happy day.