It's been really warm on the south shore of Nova Scotia for the past week or so. Mid-to-high twenties with humidex warnings – something we are not used to at all.
I drove home late this evening after playing some songs at a show in Mahone Bay. I got out at the top of my driveway to pick up the stupid flyers that someone throws there every Wednesday and I was hit with the smell of The Crooked Wood at the end of a hot day. Hot pine and spruce trees, hot fir and hemlock.
That smell never fails to take me to a very specific place and time: 1981, the Sierra Nevada mountains, California.
I was ten years old and my dad was driving me and my sister from Toronto to San Diego and back again. Why? Partly because my dad loves car trips and partly to see some cousins and my dad's grandmother (aka, my great-grandmother, "California Nana" as we called her).
We met up with one of my dad's first cousins with his wife and kids in King's Canyon National Park and spent a few days camping there. Talk about hot conifers! Ninety-some-odd degrees Fahrenheit and sunny during the days in the midst of a forest of giant sequoia and redwood trees. I don't think I'd ever smelled that smell before. Growing up in Toronto, there simply weren't enough trees and while summer trips to Harbourville, Nova Scotia had provided lots of exposure to evergreen trees, they weren't ever hot – they seemed almost perpetually fogged in, their scent easily drowned out by the smell of the salt, sea air.
I think it's safe to say that I fell in love with the smell of hot evergreen trees during those few days in King's Canyon National Park. I never smell them now without feeling something about how it felt to be 10 years old. I was on the cusp of so much change, but I wasn't changed yet. I felt I was exactly who I was, and who I had so far felt myself to be in life. That smell is locked deep in my psyche, somewhere innocent and fun-loving, a place that houses a deep sense of peace and love and selfhood.
I hope everyone has a smell like that – whether it's grandma's cookies or the smell of baseball gloves or rain on dry pavement – something that takes them back to a time that felt essential and clear, that grants a window, or better still, a door back to that state of being, to a state of grace.
Love this post!
ReplyDeleteThe smell of turkey in the oven always makes me happy, although it really shouldn't ;)
You mentioned my favourite - rain on hot pavement. I have a sound memory as well - the sound of cicadas on a really hot evening in the summer takes me right back to staying up too late in the summer when I was a kid.
Mmmm, I love what all of those sense memories you describe evoke for me, too. Some more of mine are spring peepers (just the scattered few to begin with and then the full chorus), the smell of damp wool sweaters on forest walks, the crunch of a Cortland apple, which puts me on the back of a trailer going up to load firewood onto a trailer and bring it back home, ready for winter.
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