SHORTS, NOVELS, AND OTHER THINGS
I love peaches and had never eaten a nectarine until I was in my 30s. A nectarine is basically just a fuzzless peach, the fuzzy skin governed by a single allele of their genome. Nectarines are slightly smaller and supposedly a little more aromatic than peaches, and I’m transported by the ripe smell of both. …
N is for Nectarine Read More »
Thanks to everyone visiting my blog! Coming from New England, I have to have maple syrup around: it is one of life’s wondrous staples and I love its smell. There are lots of imitations out there, Mrs. Butterworth’s for example, but nothing beats the real stuff. Maple syrup is made from the sap of the …
M is for Maple Syrup Read More »
The lovely smell of linden tree blossoms in the spring takes me back to Plymouth, where I grew up, and the old library where I spent so many happy hours reading. The library, which has since been replaced with a big modern one, was an imposing two story block building with columns on a narrow …
L is for Linden Trees Read More »
Not many people would immediately associate kerosene with the letter K. But the 100+ year old house I lived in while growing up in Plymouth had a kerosene stove in the kitchen. My mother kept it fired up for slow cooking. The supply of kerosene for the stove was found in a large cylindrical container …
This is a short, very sweet memory for me. When my husband and I moved to California in 70’s, the apartment we had rented in Newport Beach wasn’t going to be available until the end of August. So we moved into the spare bedroom of some friends from the lab where we would be working. …
With all the antibiotics, soothing balms and even treated Band Aids available to treat and disinfect kids’ cuts, there’s clearly a generational gap in the use (and smell) of iodine. When I was in my tomboy stage, which only lasted 10 years, there wasn’t much I didn’t do that was bound to give me cuts …
You can’t be a good Southerner without associating H with honeysuckle. Honeysuckle is a hardy climbing vine, common in North America, and there are 180 species worldwide. I discovered there is even a species in the foothills to the Himalayas. Did you know you can eat honeysuckle? Honeysuckle attracts butterflies and hummingbirds, of which we …
H is for Honeysuckle Read More »
One of the smells that I will roll down my car window to inhale, and then drive by its source again, is newly mown grass. I like to sit outside on a lawn chair while my husband Gene is mowing, just so I can drink it in. There’s really nothing quite like this odor, and …
G is for Grass (newly mown) Read More »
I love forsythia, their delicate yellow flowers with the barely detected scent. What I didn’t like, when I was a kid, was the fact that a forsythia branch was the means by which punishment was enforced in our home. While my mother had a Master’s degree in verbal tongue-lashing, my father was in charge of …
F is for Forsythia Read More »
Although eucalyptus is used in the saunas of many spas, I was first encountered its unique odor when we moved to California in the 1970s. Eucalyptus trees were first planted in California in the mid-1850s for use in shipbuilding, similar to its use in Australia. However, the California blue gum eucalyptus split and curled when …
E is for Eucalyptus Read More »
