summer scent, summer memory

Summer in Tuscany is a feast for the senses: the sticky, sweet smell of a fig tree, the color of sunset on custard colored palazzi, the sound of swallows diving for morning breakfast, the taste of sweet melon and salty prosciutto makes your taste buds explode!
Perhaps the sense that hits me the hardest are the smells of summer, scents that bring back a flood of memories from summers past, both in Italy and in Pennsylvania...

Burning wood
August, Girl Scout camp. Right after dinner we did flag ceremony in the field, as the sun was setting, and then we would take the girls back to their camp site and get them settled in for the night. I would build a little fire and then walk up to the mess hall through the woods, in the dark, to get supplies for making s'mores. No flashlight. Just the moon. And the smell of campfires burning. Knowing it was the end of summer, autumn just around the corner, and that this simple task was so comforting and simple.

Three red feathers (watercolor on paper), 2013

Jasmine
My first summer in Florence. Nighttime, near midnight. Sitting on the balcony of Alberto's apartment in Piazza Antonelli, eating watermelon and spitting seeds down at the stray cats circling around the umbrella pines. The scent of jasmine at night would be so strong (and as it turns out, I'm allergic) that it would fill up the bedroom and cling to the mosquito nets above the bed.

Tuscan Moonrise (watercolor on paper), 2013

Linseed oil
Ambler, PA. My grandmother's art studio had a sky-light that would flood the wood paneled space with warm light and make the scent of linseed oil even stronger. It was right off the kitchen, and when she cooked eggs in the morning, the smell of oil paints and linseed mixed with the smell of toast and dippy egg. Dippy egg. Now there's a Pennsylvania word.


In any case, when it comes to senses and memory, Proust knew what he was talking about:

"No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of it origin...And suddenly the memory revealed itself. The taste was that of the little piece of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray...my aunt Leonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of tea or tisane. The sight of the little madeleine had recalled nothing to my mind before I tasted it. And all from my cup of tea."

- Marcel Proust from "À la recherche du temps perdu"