But there was a smell that went with it ... so unlike my New Zealand scentscape that instead of rejecting it, I loved it as 'city', perhaps in the same way that I love different perfumes for memory, mood and ocassion. Pollution is my city perfume, first smelt in Los Angelos and forever associated with that city of sunshine.
Antwerpen shares this city scent, mostly particularly on blue-sky-sunny-days. The sky appears to be deep blue at the uppermost point of the dome but slowly the graduated layers of pollution appear to thicken until they touch the ground and the air becomes deeply discoloured in the distance. The air quality here is better than Istanbul but it is also cooler, less exotic and less full of promise. It doesn't matter, I still love this scent of a living breathing city.
I will deny it back in New Zealand. There are a million smells I love there. I have memories of waking at Lake Rotoiti, in a cabin in a Beech forest and only being able smell the sun heating the trees after a stormy night... the air was thick with Nature. And there is the incredible smell of the wet forest down at Tautuku ... the rotting top layer, the ferns and old trees, with the scent of the Pacific Ocean, just a few 100 metres away, mixing with everything. I always wish to bottle that smell and carry it with me.
I sat for a long time at the edge of a lake close to Queenstown. It was up in the hills and I was trying to break down and identify the incredible air there. Perhaps it was a mix of Rosehip and golden grass, of Matagouri and the lake itself ... it was complex and simple in the same moment.
Matsuo Basho wrote that, 'everday is a journey and the journey itself is home'. Perhaps this explains my fickle nature, I can love both the land and the city ... the journey is home for me.
4 comments:
This is lovely. I haven't been to NZ, and it's the opposite corner of the globe from (other) home in Seattle, but the ferns and the big trees and the smell of the ocean are, I think, something we have in common. I pine for that ocean smell in landlocked Austria which smells right now of grass and cows.
Gorgeous post. I keep rereading it, as I sit here sipping (and sniffing) my morning tea.
My favorite smell in Salamanca is damp stone on rainy days, although I love the smell of the heat in summer (I never before lived where you could smell the heat, but, oh, you can in Spain) and the smells of my walk to work - incense from some church or another, bread baking, chocolate wafting out of the croissanteria. Salamanca's small enough that every smell you pass is intense...
But I miss the smell of salt sea air and drying seaweed from New England, where I grew up on a street that deadended into a bay. And I miss the jasmine-infused summer nights at my house in California...
Even though every city has it's own scent and taste, you can know from the scent that you're in a city.
It's funny that sometimes you sense a scent that takes you to some city. I miss few scents a lot.. ;)
Love the quote by the way.
So much more poetic than the Bonnie Raitt line I usually quote - "Because the road's my middle name."
:)
Post a Comment