2025
Here are some musings that I shared over on Patreon last month, but I had so much fun thinking about it, I thought I might share it here, too…
If you were ever inclined to summon me through olfactory means, forget the perfumes. Set aside the bottles with their crystal stoppers and pretentious names and the same four influencers waving bottles of Fulton and Roark in your face (anyone else notice this lately?) The scents that would draw me across time and space aren’t found in glass vials but in ordinary places hiding extraordinary power—a backyard tree, a garden herb, a lakeside path, a kitchen spice cabinet.
Lime Blossom
Our small lime tree produces blossoms whose fragrance bears no resemblance to the fruit itself. The scent is remarkably elusive—more delicate than jasmine, more ephemeral than honeysuckle, yet in their general fragrant family. It possesses a waxy, honeyed quality without any heaviness, a pearlescent aroma with the faintest sheen of green.
The fragrance never quite resolves itself—one moment offering a metallic brightness, the next dissolving into a gossamer floral sweetness. The blooms are small white stars against green, but their scent has a peculiar effect—you breathe it in and lose a bit of time. Not enough to notice consciously, but when you finally step away, there’s a subtle shift in the world. The angle of shadows has changed imperceptibly, or perhaps it’s the quality of light. Something has altered, but the transition was so gentle you can’t quite place what’s different.
Marjoram
Where lime blossom quietly steals time, fresh marjoram does the opposite—it gifts you time, expanding moments through unexpected memory. One brush against those leaves and suddenly my childhood unfolds before me—that worn, cardboard box of Avon potpourri Christmas ornaments from the attic, dust motes dancing in half-light. Time doesn’t contract but extends, allowing me to linger within recollections I’d forgotten I possessed.
Unlike other culinary herbs, marjoram plays a generous trick. It possesses a warm, slightly piney aroma laced with subtle citrus and an unexpected mustiness that makes no botanical sense. It carries the essence of Christmas in a 1980s suburban home, captured and preserved in an herb that has absolutely no business reminding me of holiday decorations.
What captivates me most is the precision of the association—not Christmas broadly, but specifically those ornaments, that cardboard box, that particular December quality of light in our living room. The scent doesn’t evoke a generic holiday memory but rather a moment so exact and crystalline that it feels like time travel of the most personal kind. It’s not that marjoram smells like Christmas; it’s that marjoram smells exactly like my Christmas, circa 1987.
Cypress Loam
A walking path circles a small lake behind the library in the neighborhood where I grew up. I lived there from ages 8 to 28, knowing every corner of that landscape as only a child-becoming-adult can. On the side where the cypress trees grow, their knobby “knees” breaching the soil, resides a wonderful aroma. Sweet, earthy, damp, with a subtle touch of spice that eluded identification for years.
I left Florida for seven years, convinced I’d never return to the place you’re supposed to leave behind forever. Then life happened—grandparents fell ill, a relationship ended—and at 36, I found myself living just five minutes from my childhood home. The first time I walked that library path again, the cypress loam scent hit me with such force that time compressed and expanded simultaneously. Recently, Yvan sprinkled cinnamon on damp soil for some pest-related issue, and that combination—spice mingling with mineralic soil—recalled exactly those library walks, those years before and after, the place I couldn’t escape.
The scent is earthier than a temple but somehow just as sacred. When sunlight streams through the cypress canopy and the ground releases its secret aromas, a perfect moment emerges where everything feels alive and ancient at once. If Miyazaki’s forest spirits possessed a scent signature, this would be it—that specific mineralic dampness that reveals why ancient cultures believed trees could talk. The cypress loam doesn’t just evoke a location but a timeline—the person I was, the person I became, and the unlikely circular journey that brought me back to where I began.
Cardamom
Unlike the other scents that connect to memory or specific places, my relationship with cardamom stands apart. It’s not entangled with nostalgia or childhood or anyone else but me. It defies categorization—refusing to fit neatly into any olfactory family. While other spices lean decidedly warm (cinnamon being the prime example), cardamom exists in contradictions. Cool and woody one moment, then floral and green the next, with unexpected piney-lemony facets that appear and vanish like apparitions.
My attraction to cardamom reminds me of what occult scholar Pam Grossman says about witches: “Daughters, mothers, queens, virgins, wives, et al. derive meaning from their relation to another person. Witches, on the other hand, have power on their own terms.” Where my other beloved scents derive meaning through their connection to my past or to places I’ve known, cardamom demands nothing but direct experience. My love for it isn’t mediated through memory or association—it exists purely in the present moment, sovereign and self-contained.
I find myself in the kitchen, mortar and pestle in hand, inhaling deeply over freshly ground pods like some sort of spice pervert. When perfumers attempt to capture cardamom, they typically emphasize its warmth, yet miss its strange, alien coolness—that medicinal edge that renders it so utterly fascinating. I’ve sought perfumes solely for their cardamom notes, but nothing quite captures its peculiar magic. It exists in its own parallel universe, following none of the established rules—autonomous and complete, requiring no validation beyond its own existence.
So there they are—the four scents that would instantly draw me into your summoning circle. What scents would I need to conjure you? I would be delighted to know which non-bottled aromas would call your spirit across the veil.
The photo is actually a lemon blossom from our lemon tree, but details, details.
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