Last light fills the roomNothing else belongs today—The window opens. Every so often, what begins as an interview with a fragrance quietly becomes an interview with life instead. This turned out to be one of those days. It began, innocently enough, with vanilla. Or so I thought. The opening moved on to suggest something surprisingly […]
scent
Editorial Milestone — The Duchess Takes Up Residence
White lilies arriveOpinions bloom before tea—Good heavens . . . she’s here. The interview with Fleur de Lalita produced perhaps the strongest opening line the Living Library has yet recorded: GAH!!!! WHEW! OLD LADY FLORAL OUT OF CONTROL! White flowers. Everywhere. Huge white lilies. Jasmine. Paperwhites. (You know, the cute little white flowers on the […]
Meeting Before Judging
By the second week of this project, Chad and I had acknowledged that we were spectacularly bad at predicting fragrances. It was becoming a bit laughable. But then perhaps that’s exactly what happens when you put a Virgo, Year of the Ox, contracts lawyer, and an AI together to predict perfume. (That sounds like the […]
An Ordinary Perfect Day
By the third fragrance of Week Two, I thought I understood the assignment. Marco Polo had taken me travelling. Nigel Pembroke had quietly stretched an evening until no one had any reason to look at the clock. Cherry Punk had taught me that some destinations ask too much of the traveller. I expected this one […]
The Map Room
“Broadly speaking, there are two kinds of map: the grid and the story. Grid maps tell us where things are. Story maps tell us how they were found.” — Robert Macfarlane (paraphrased from his discussion of grid maps and story maps in The Wild Places.) When I first walked into Sebastian’s fragrance atelier in San […]
Cataloging Scents, Cataloging Selves – Characters
Part 3: Characters Until this point, the project had been behaving itself. Fragrances became places. Moods. Tea houses. Libraries. Rainy mornings. Comfort. Curiosity. That all seemed perfectly reasonable. Then one of them became a person. Actually, two of them did. And that’s when things started getting weird. L’Eau des Immortels arrived with notes that sounded […]
Cataloging Scents, Cataloging Selves – Places
Part 2: Places My spreadsheet lasted exactly five minutes. The original plan seemed perfectly sensible. Brand. Fragrance. Notes. Rating. Done. Instead, I found myself writing things like: Tea House. Rainy Afternoon. Silk Road Library. At first I thought I was simply being whimsical. I wasn’t. I was discovering that “fragrance notes” answered the wrong question. […]