In the past few days and weeks Charleston has offered up a head-full of magnificent smell, from magnolias to jasmine and roses and honeysuckle … and a combination, on one single street, of all of the above mixed with warm grass and a newly blooming flower, barely fragrant, aided by the pure air of lessened traffic. Smell and color make me particularly grateful — one of the things that make my spirit awaken and remember forever.
This morning, not for the first time, while walking by a honeysuckle bush whose blooms has just passed, ripe, decaying a bit perhaps, I was reminded of a middle-school trip I took to Capri. On that trip I did not have much spending money: even sending me had been, I think, a bit of a sacrifice for my parents. We spent a few days in Amalfi, and Positano, and Sorrento, then took the boat to Capri. Rowdy kids, out of control.
Yet, I remember the sun and the alleys and the blue, the great turquoise blue of Mediterranean and sky, and the solitude and silence of the alleys. And then I remember the smells of Capri; the flowering vines everywhere, bougainvillea, fuchsia, reds, violets, geraniums, jasmine. The teachers let us go shopping a bit, with whatever we had to spend. This — as much as I like to think of myself as young — this was before everything shifted and buying buying buying came to pervade everything. In Italy there was still no McDonald’s or any other American mega-company. Capri was still pristine, with little shops nestled here and there. And I remember the one thing I bought was a small bottle of perfume made in Capri, in a tiny elegant essence shop long-established on the island, in which the fragrances were so strong and inebriating that it was hard to pick one or smell one. But to this day I remember walking out onto the shaded alley with my yellow-tinted little bottle, square and encased in a velvet-lined box, blooming bergamotto, orange, tuberose, jasmine, and something that smelled airy like sun and sea mist, pure and clean. Sweet, and absolutely beautiful in the most unattainable way. Yearning.
I still wish I had that little bottle in my hands, so precious. But I still have a sense of its fragrance left in me — forever.