(This post also includes a fragrance list of associated perfumes after the jump.)
Trees were the first perfumers I knew. By this, I mean that the forest taught me how to recognize the smell of pine needles and bark and soil; it displaced me from being nose-blind, stuffed with city smog, and it made the world alien enough for me to ask questions about creation, about an atmosphere I could not afford to be jaded about. It taught me to pay attention to the details of a place and lean into the orchestra of animals I am part of but didn’t yet understand. Humans dominate cityscapes, but forests? In forests, we’re just another animal. And trees taught me that. The monotony of a forest to a city kid dropped into it - it can make one feral, fast. You have to learn all your senses to navigate it.
I was at summer camp as a pre-teen, maybe 10 years old, when a counselor instructed a handful of us to stand in a circle in an opening of pine trees and held up a tiny canister like a bullet in front of us.
“Tell me what is in this without opening it,” they said, handing it to the first person to reach for it. A challenge, set in a way to make it seem more like magic than a task of observation. A closed-door mystery set in nature placed neatly in our palms.
We all made wild guesses, shaking it, weighing it, bribing them for answers. Some people scattered after their first guesses, but the more times people got it wrong the more I wanted to know. When it was passed to me, I put it to my ear and shook it, listened to it scatter. I guess coffee beans first - wrong, the noise inside was…thinner. Then I sniffed it, walked around the people still gathered, sniffed it again and looked up to the trees shading us in cloudy weather. Shook it again as the wind picked up, watched the branches. And then I got it.
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