tinyletter #005
n a fifty minute span of time yesterday afternoon I impulse purchased a floor length gown embroidered with birds of paradise, a perfume that claims to smell exactly like Northern Arizona, six empanadas, and a dozen packets of heirloom seeds named things like “My Lover Lies Bleeding,” and “Pride of Gibraltar,” all of which served as proof that the farther north I go the more I long for south as a noun. South, where South means mangroves and desert both, wide porches and hacienda houses, Southwest as made famous by Joan Didion, the heavy death of Nevadan air, South as Lana del Rey’s fever dream, South where the saguaro don’t die, South without the racism, without the blood in the soil, South as it never was, never will be, amen.
The South creeps up in me like a vine, like my mental illness, ensnaring me while I am unaware. When I eventually take notice and find I am in cowboy boots in a Toronto January, listening to The Secret Sisters and saving photos of Phoenix street art on my phone, I am too far gone to let it do anything other than bloom.
I found Hi Wildflower Botanica’s line on Twitter months ago and then by happenstance again last week, when I was wandering through Arielle Shoshanaand picked up a bottle of Ancients, inhaled, and began weeping in public. An earthy assemblage of moss, blue cypress, geranium, and Kashmiri lavender, it smells like marsh soil, the kind that is perpetually wet, the way you expect everything in Louisiana to smell even if you’ve never been in a cypress swamp and have no idea what one would smell like. Just imagine ghosts that still have the ability to sweat. The scent is not immediately wearable; in fact, it doesn’t smell like perfume at all. It smells like land, active and a noun and here, not foreign land, a vacation, the lie of coconut blended with salt and simple syrup and bottled for the sole purpose of making the wearer feel absent from their current location, well traveled and elsewhere. Ancients smells like your backyard, being eleven and young enough to still use the swing set your father built and old enough to not want your school friends to know you do so. Ancients smells like reading Laura Ingalls Wilder.
Ancients stays on my clothes like lake water when you leave your bathing suit and towel crumpled in a backpack and pull it out four days later, cold and damp but not molding. Not yet. Wearing it has caused no less than four people to pull me back in by the shoulder after a greeting saying, “you smell..nice? Kind of? Familiar, what is that?” It is my backwoods southern upbringing, endearing in its familiarity and lack of obvious beauty and clinging to me even when I try to put something else on. Maison Francis Kurkdijan’s Oud. A New York address. I bought it in a rollerball so that I can swipe it on while on streetcars, snow without end slushing under the tracks. Or when I cannot find good Mexican food anywhere, anywhere, so I settle for Indian, again. I swipe it on during anxious dentist appointments, before bed, while I pray a rosary, when I want to feel small, known, steady, bound to a dirt I can lie and say is mine. Ancients is the falsehood of home. And really, this is the power of perfume as an art form; it is capable of more than making us smell good, though that is its main aim. Perfume forcibly reminds us who and what we are, what memories we belong to. It acts as instant teleportation and time travel, relocating both the wearer and those around them to a place where they are able to wrap the thin veil of memory or imagination or both around them, and remember.