In the archives of my scent library

Published in Cheechable Magazine, Spring 2024

Smells are storytellers. I collect smells. Bottles and jars that blur the line between functional fragrances and personal anthology. Scents are keepers of memories, an intangible and peculiar essence that has always fascinated me. So, throughout my life I've carefully preserved and catalogued them for the archives of my scent library.

Remnants of an outlaw's garden, 2012. 

We trimmed hundreds of pounds of Blue Dream that year. Every piece of clothing I owned was resinous and smelled like an illegal candy store. I mailed myself a jar of it. Tightly sealed, it still holds the last breath of a harvest that once clung to me with its sticky sweetness—the undeniable smell on favourite sweaters left in Garberville dumpsters.

Inexpensive Parisian perfume, 1992.  

When Jenny returned to the 7th grade after wintering with her family in Paris, she brought each girl in my class a little bottle of perfume. To 12-year-old me, Paris was the height of sophistication, and the perfume was exquisite. I still have it twenty-five years later, almost empty and worn only on the rarest occasions.

Mama Rock's Rose Garden, 2013.

Mama Rock lived in a big house with a garden full of roses. I spent her last summer there, wandering around, picking my favourite flowers, eating their petals right off the blooms. Concocting sweet potions of rose petal sugar, rose shortbread cookies, rose honeys, and rose syrups to preserve the loveliness of that slow summer. With the last of the late season blossoms and makeshift supplies, I made a bottle of rose water—a melancholy whisper of rose mingled with wet rocks and a winter that came too soon.

Jack Herer & Clary Sage, 2018.

Delirious from freshly picked baskets of clary sage, I feel high as the flower's steam cools and drops in heartbeats from the copper al-ambique still. Thrilled at the success of my hydrosol, I pack two pounds of freshly harvested cannabis flower into the column, fill it with water and seal it the traditional way with cracker dough dried in the sun. The first drops are perfectly buttery, and I nibble on cracker crumbs as the cannabis-scented water fills my mason jar.

California, 2023.

The arid, perfumed breezes in August are exactly how I remember them. I wish I could keep it—the clandestine sweetness of California bottled alongside my Parisian perfume and the bittersweet roses of Mama Rock’s garden. Every scent has a story in my ever-dissipating library.