Day 34 ~ One Year, One Nose

I wonder sometimes if anybody's reading these anymore. I realize some of them may be succinct or even boring, but you never know when you might find a piece of information that is helpful to you, even if you do have to read half the dictionary to find it. This applies in my life in many ways. In my j o b, the place that brings in the rent, I work with words all day -- listening to them being spoken back and forth, writing them down and then hearing in the voices the deceptions, the truths, the tragedies, and those bits of information teased out of four hours or more of narrative that are pivotal. In my work here in the perfumery -- hours upon hours of combining this with that and finding disaster after disaster until alas, amongst the rubbish of discarded scent strips and droppers and dirtied lab glass I finally find that one combination with huge potential. It seems we must make our way through the mundane to find the spectacular.

I've been spending a lot of time lately with my new friend, Netflix, watching BBC series' and time period pieces, The Grand Hotel, The Buccaneers, a whole lotta based on Catherine Cookson novels. I was in the middle of the series A Dinner of Herbs when I decided to stop being a weird hermit and go out and do something. So I went to the nursery and bought herbs -- German thyme, sweet basil, common sage, chocolate mint, orange mint, and just because I can't resist a good violet smelling anything, a pack of fragrant violas. Then I went to a discount store and found a lovely faux antique garden stand for a song, brought it home and loaded it up. Most of my gardening will be in pots this year as my backyard is completely shaded by huge trees and nothing on the ground gets steady sun. My tomatoes and lettuce and cukes and pumpkins are going to be living in pots on the front porch where they will get at least a few hours of sun a day.

It's Rogue Festival here in the Tower and all the pubs and restaurants and art galleries are hopping with activity. Saturday night we (the family) went down to have dinner and were held up on the sidewalk by a reality show in progress -- something about mannequin models, live women, who stand in shop windows wearing the store's latest arrivals -- it was in front of Valentino's, a trendy local shop that features Rockabilly, Punk, Rocker, Goth and other non-Walmart type clothing. The shop windows at Valentino's are always dolled up with mannequins wearing stunning 40s and 50s style wiggle dresses and sporting Hello Kitty handbags and clear plexiglass platform stiletto shoes. This night, however, the mannequins were real women, and the crowd in front of the windows were thoroughly entertained as the camera crew inside filmed and the store staff switched bags and accessories on the still-standing models. Everywhere else in the Tower was just mad with people -- I love seeing it come alive like this.

So what's the sniff'a for today? Well, those herbs I mentioned earlier. As I was planting them on the front porch, a few people on the sidewalk paused to comment that they smelled something good -- personally, I think it was the thyme and basil that were giving off rays of scent like starbursts. It smelled foodie, but also smelled of the earth; the garden. The smell of them, those mints, the sage, the thyme and basil, and the potting soil, stuck on me for the rest of the evening until I washed them off. That is the perfume I love most, like the perfume of life.