Tuesday 24 November 2020 :: I was working late and listening to Rickie Lee Jones and Shawn Colvin and hoped my wife was having good dreams in Florida. I thought about my daughter in the Powderhorn and hoped she was happy, safe, and that we could spend the holiday together. I thought about our overseas Christmas together a few years ago too, and began to look through my photos from the trip. I was completely absorbed in my screen like I was there, when a floral scent slowly filled my corner of the room, and lingered, then vanished as quickly as it appeared — like maybe it didn’t happen, that maybe I’d imagined it. I got up from my chair and searched around my worktable and eventually wandered through the entire house trying to identify the source. I couldn’t find anything. The smell of lavendar isn’t an everyday scent. Maybe during the summer when I’m on the deck near the potted lavender, but it was late November, the plants were frozen, and I was inside.
Soon after we moved into this house, we noticed a lavender scent would appear and linger for a minute or two and then completely disappear. It happened a hand full of times during our first year. We usually experienced it together and eventually thought the same thing. Someone, or something, was in the room with us. It was random but it felt specific and intentional. Eventually we decided that if it was someone, maybe it was the original owner of our house, the grandmother of the person we bought the house from. Maybe she was checking to investigate who we were, if we were worthy the house she and her husband had built in 1920. When that happens, so obviously out of place and time, yet crisp and real, it means something else is happening. When both of us are experiencing the same thing simultaneously, it’s real.
Eventually it stopped happening. Then this night I thought she might be back, but it smelled more like lilac, not lavender. It was different and made me think about my mom, her favorite color, and the lilac bushes she and my dad had planted between our house and the neighbor’s house. They provided a tall, green fence eight months of the year. When they bloomed their perfume was trapped in that in between space just like that night, where I could just linger in a white and purple cloud.
Songs :: Into Dust by Mazy Star, Send Somebody by Colin Hay, It’s For You by Lyle Mays and Pat Metheny, and Into the Mystic by Van Morrison
© C. Davidson