my Grandmother's silver perfume flask with funnel, handed down to me
Unless you are a merperson, this one doesn't grow in the garden but if you are a connoisseur of fragrance, you will want this one on your olfactory 'nose shelf'.
This is from my diary 2008...
I received a small sample of Ambergris today...that most fabled and elusive of all perfume ingredients, from the Perfumer's Apprentice. I could smell it before I opened the package! (No whales were harmed) I put a small dab on the back of my hand; as from skin is the truest way to 'sample' a fragrance. This was only a 3% tincture but it lasted for h o u r s... taking me on journey back into childhood. Somehow this was familiar to my cellular memory, but it was beyond me to remember when I might have whiffed this before. I turned off my rational thinking and went immediately to my Grandfather's stone farm house in northern Virginia..a house that took a canon ball during the civil war. But no, wait; the scene shifted a few miles across town to my great Aunt Peggy's farm; the horsie auntie...the auntie who started the Gold Cup Steeple Chase race in Warrenton, Va. Yes...here it is.
If the word 'patina' has a smell to it; this is it. Vignettes flashed through my thoughts in no particular order...great Uncle Connie's riding boots in the closet; the ones he wore riding in the Olympic Games (1929?). There are layers of horse, root cellar, pipe tobacco, saddles cleaned with saddle soap after every ride, blue shadows from The Shenandoah Mts, a mustiness but not unpleasant, perhaps from the heavy drapery in an upstairs bedroom that hasn't been drawn in decades. This was the fragrance of a bygone way of life; where there is more space between the clock ticks. I spent the afternoon as a ten year old again, in her father's family's fold in time.
If the word 'patina' has a smell to it; this is it. Vignettes flashed through my thoughts in no particular order...great Uncle Connie's riding boots in the closet; the ones he wore riding in the Olympic Games (1929?). There are layers of horse, root cellar, pipe tobacco, saddles cleaned with saddle soap after every ride, blue shadows from The Shenandoah Mts, a mustiness but not unpleasant, perhaps from the heavy drapery in an upstairs bedroom that hasn't been drawn in decades. This was the fragrance of a bygone way of life; where there is more space between the clock ticks. I spent the afternoon as a ten year old again, in her father's family's fold in time.
