Category: perfume

Merry, Merry Month of May.

May is a marvelous month.  It’s filled with warm days, fresh rains, and new growth.  It teases us with hints of summer.  Oh, sure, the softball-sized magnolias boast their sturdy petals, but at the first strong breeze, the flower petals fall and tumble down the street.  Soon the green leaves will be budding.  The gardenias are resplendent in their soft fragrance, and the jasmine bursts across mailboxes and fences.  Inch worms hang from the trees, green helicopters fall and twist as they fall from the maple trees, other plants bud overnight, and robins hop along in the yards.

May is always a month I eagerly await.  In the ancient days of my childhood, it meant hopping on my bike after school and again after supper, pedaling through the familiar streets of the city where I grew up, mapping out future adventures in my mind as the evenings stretched longer and warmer.

Always, the fresh-smelling rain comes in May.  The air is still cool, so a windbreaker or sweater is the necessary fashion in the early days of the month.  By the end of May, that meant cotton sundresses and seersucker hats would soon become the norm for the next four months.

May smells fresh and new and clean and pure.  May brings the purple and white lilacs that bloom for a few short weeks, enveloping the spring air with perfume.  As kids, my friends and I would pluck blossoms and suck their nectar; or so we thought.  We just wanted to be filled inside with May’s loveliest flower.  But by high school, I dropped the weird ritual and stuck with just breathing in the flowers’ delicate fragrance.

Some cultures consider lilacs to represent strong people.  Some believe it to be the flower of love.  It reminds me of my grandma, because the lilac was her favorite flower, as is mine.

Although I liked the somewhat rare while lilac bushes, I was absolutely enchanted by that purple hue of the blossoms that ran from palest amethyst to deepest royal purple.  For a few years, my sister and I even had our bedroom painted lilac.  On gloomy, sunless days the walls slipped toward grey, but when the sun poured in, the whole room seemed to brighten into pastel purple.  For Easter, in my thirteenth year, I wore a lilac chiffon dress with white polka dots, tiny pleats, and a soft lettuce hem.  My school folders, notebooks, and a Bic® pen I owned boasted purple ink, too.  It was the color that threaded through my days, so constant that I hardly noticed it.

Every place where I lived around the country, lilacs were a reality of springtime.  In fact, I lived in a town once where it seemed that everyone had at least one lilac shrub in their yard.  The entire town smelled of that pretty fragrance for weeks!

May is a special month for me, and when I catch a whiff of that springtime perfume, I can still remember burying my face in a perfumed cloud of lilac blossoms.  The memories will remain enduring, and they will envelop me, as only the most beautiful of spring flowers can do.

In the door-yard fronting an old farm-house, near the white-wash’d palings,
Stands the lilac bush, tall-growing, with heart-shaped leaves of rich green,
With many a pointed blossom, rising, delicate, with the perfume strong I love,
With every leaf a miracle……and from this bush in the door-yard,
With delicate-color’d blossoms, and heart-shaped leaves of rich green,
A sprig, with its flower, I break.

—Walt Whitman, “When Lilacs Last in the Door-yard Bloom’d,” 1865.

 

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The Stankles.

I lived in a large mid‑rise building, the kind with long hallways, welcoming vestibules, perpetually humming vents, and a cast of neighbors who could each anchor their own documentary.  Life at the Sage Pointe Condominiums was never dull, especially if you had a sensitive nose.  In today’s essay, I’d like to introduce you to one of our more… aromatic residents.  I have lived in buildings that have friendly doormen or fresh flowers in the lobby, and a dedicated cleaning crew that cleaned and deodorized a couple times a week.  However, at Sage Pointe Condominiums we had odors—layered and evolving.

Whenever I opened my front door or step off the elevator, I braced myself.  I never knew what invisible cloud would greet me, or what new olfactory assault would come barreling toward my unsuspecting nose.

The most infamous contributors were Adonis and his family, whom I privately referred to as The Stankles.  If it were scientifically possible for a scent to take physical form, they would have travelled through life surrounded by a perpetual soft green fog—something between a cartoonish stink cloud and a government chemical weapons test.  Each member of the family seemed to believe that the only way to apply cologne was to marinate in it.  Not spritz.  Not dab.  Marinate.

When that throat‑tightening, eye‑watering haze slapped me across the face, I know exactly what it means: The Stankles had either left for work and school or had triumphantly returned.  They lived on the opposite end of the hallway from me, which maked the reach of their fumes all the more impressive.  For the stench to drift all the way to my wing, it must have been clinging to them like a second skin, and through all seven layers, too.

I imagined inside their condominium.  In my mind, a greenish mist hung in the air like a permanently stagnant weather system.  The scent must have ripened throughout the week, as it settled into the carpet, the curtains, the couch cushions, the walls; every surface absorbing a different note from each family member’s chosen fragrance.  One of them preferred something sharp and citrusy, another something musky and sweet, another something like patchouli mixed with body odor, and yet another something that smelled like a gas station bathroom trying its best.  The combination was… unique.

The elevator, of course, had its own adventure.  It faithfully recorded the comings and goings of the building’s most pungent citizens.  Step inside, and you could tell instantly whether The Stankles had recently passed through.  But they weren’t the only ones who left their mark.

There’s The Princess, whose perfume was so distinctive it might as well be trademarked.  She rocked through the building with her dogs like a scented comet, leaving behind a shimmering trail of powdery, floral, dirt, and a slightly sweaty body odor insistence.  And then there was the unmistakable contribution of The Weede Family, whose fusty skunk aroma drifted through the vents with the determination of a creature lazily seeking freedom.

Their stories and their scents deserved essays of their own.  And believe me, I’ll get to them in future essays.  Life at the Sage Pointe Condominiums provides no shortage of material.  For now, consider this your first whiff of the cast of characters who made my building unforgettable in ways I never asked for.

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