Bitter Fruit, Sweet Perfume
This morning, blue sky and bird song. Gentle sunlight caresses the dark green leaves of rose bushes and oak trees. The aroma is beyond delicious. It reminds me of a lost park I frequented as a teenage girl. It smelled magnificent there, like sweet, sappy frankincense and myrrh, with wet green notes, geosmin, and a whisper of hay. There was an oak tree in the center and in its heart a beehive, which hummed resonantly with mystic anthophilous chant. I could not explain this place. Masked in the banality of a tiny public park with an altar disguised as a solitary stone picnic bench, it dripped with magic.
I went there daily and never saw another soul. What was there for an ordinary person to do in such a place? No space or attractions for children to play. No room for birthday parties, soccer matches, or softball games. Only gorgeous aromatic plants and herbs, and an old tree full of bees at the apex of a long uphill road flanked by suburban neighborhoods neatly tucked behind high stone walls. Beyond the park were wild hills full of coyotes and jackrabbits. To be there was to inhabit the remarkable dissonance between one world and another. It was an impossible liminal space that welcomed me alone.
Two black kittens sit beside me as I write these words, twins, sniffing the air. Air like this can be drunk like wine. A white rose blossom ignites with morning light. Birds flutter among the oak leaves. When I was a teenage girl, I wanted to escape the town where I lived. In my urgency to be elsewhere, and my newness, I couldn’t comprehend the uniquely wild strangeness that lurked around almost every corner in that place. When I think now of where I grew, I see that I could only become a strange bloom and then a bitter fruit. Sweet fruits are for the breakfast table, and bitter fruits are for the perfumer’s vial.
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