Memories

A customer stood among our roses this morning reliving a memory from her youth. She grew up in a city neighborhood, she said, and she remembers riding her bike down the hill to dinner at this time of year.

Every house on her street had at least one American Beauty rose, and as she remembers it, the entire neighborhood was perfumed by American Beauty’s true rose fragrance in the late afternoon sun.

“You’re too young to remember how popular that rose was,” she smiled. I think she was being kind.

Our senses play such games with us as we get older, bringing back  memories unasked for but often wonderful. Some memories are clear and real, like the warmth of the sand at the beach on your fingers, gritty and smooth at the same time, when a particular old song comes on the radio.   Some  are more cloudy, like the feeling that you’ve been to this very spot years and years ago  when you round a corner in Manhattan. 

But it seems to me that the sense of smell is our most trustworthy guide, directing us straight and true as an arrow through a door to the past. Example:  the heady aroma of  ‘Dr Merrill’, the earliest star magnolia in bloom at the end of April transports me to my childhood bedroom, that huge, glorious tree  in full flower right outside my bedroom window reminding me that my birthday is only days away. Is it any wonder that my husband and children gave me just that variety of magnolia  twenty years ago Mother’s Day and planted it outside my bedroom window? Of course, the g00d Doctor could forget to bloom next spring, and I could forget to be one year older…

Other aromas work just as well to jog our memories as the fragrances of plants do. Close your eyes and remember your mother’s perfume, the smell of the sea in a storm, the warm clean new baby smell that even years later means “love”. Every time I bake my Grandma”s challah she becomes so real to me that I swear I wouldn’t be at all surprised if she walked into my kitchen and enveloped me in a hug that smelled of flour and starch and rosewater. 

Which brings us back to roses: I’m the Rose Lady here at Weston, and I always find it sweetly amusing when a customer buries her nose in a rose and pronounces it the “rosiest” smelling rose of all, since the customer before her most likely gave that title to a different rose altogether, and the customer before her to still another. Each customer has her own doorway to the past.

What a shame I can’t share in their fragrance-induced memories. The people I might meet and the places I might see!