scent memories: the last beauties of the season

I couldn't believe it when I walked through the flower-mart entry at Trader Joe's this afternoon. These are among my three or four favourite flowers ever in my life, ever, and I've never seen them sold. Naked Lady amaryllis (I can't help saying "AmaryLLITH" for any Music Man fans out there), a flower from my childhood which still haunts me with its smell and the way of its growth. I wish I had photos of the stalks coming from the bare shadowy ground, like girly snakes, before the buds open, but for some reason I can't get them to grow, and I seem to always miss them when I visit my mom in Tuolumne every summer (not where I grew up-no Nuetra in Tuolumne!-but often planted in the thirties or fifties and still thriving where they are). And I wish Blogger had smell-o-vision, because the perfume is fabulous: shockingly sweet and girly, but wild and sharp rather than heavy or sickly or childish. My olfactory memory actually combines it with Concord grape (like Welch's!) because they come out at the same time of the year, and grew in the same part of our yard. A glorious, drowning perfume.

Which makes me think of other scent-combo-memories: night jessamine and a trace of skunk from summer nights living in Mt Washington; cigarettes, fried chicken and turpentine from my mother's parents' apartment in North Hollywood; gunpowder and cut grass from childhood 4ths of July by the Altadena country club; brushfire, borade (does it have a smell? or just a horrible, opressive colour and B-17 sound?) and cut grass from my father's parents' in Calabasas.

Do you notice one common thread in all these? that they are all season-specific? They all come up for me as real sensations; and I know I have a whole library of scent-memories, equally sensate, for the rest of the year, which I cannot now up-summon. An old friend, Sarah, told me once, that as the seasons come around, events and experiences and traumas come up again in our memories at the same times of year. I really like that idea; it confirms my adamant belief in seasonality (food in season, holiday decorations dammit!).

My whole apartment smells of them................