The Perfume Garden

Perfume is the key to our memories

Your home is within you, you carry your place in the world.

The end is never the end. It's always the the beginning of something.

Change is the one sure thing in life

My whole life, I’ve felt I was homesick for somewhere I’d never known.’ She told me that in Britain, where she grew up, the Celts called it ‘hiraeth’—a longing for home.

Would you rather die like a hero or live like a coward?

Roots and wings, Em,” she remembered her mother saying. “That’s what you give your children.

Never let your capacity for love be diminished by the actions of others.

People need things like perfume and poetry, music and art more than ever during times like this. People need to remember the simple joys in life. If you forget, if life loses its color then they have won. Those cowardly, heartless bastards have won.

I’ll never forget what she said to me about having a baby. She said that she would wake in the morning to my cries, and wonder how she would get through another day. Perhaps Freya wasn’t a natural mother—some women aren’t, I suppose, and it can’t have been easy for her.

Freya, I killed a man.

Duende rose from the bowels of the earth, forked like electricity through the notes, the voice, her limbs. As the music flowed, she lost herself. It was always like this. This was a dance that was in her blood, her bones. She had performed so many times, in the caves with her family. She had danced in the shadow of the Alhambra for Lorca. Her hand snaked above her, like vines. She remembered him reciting, an incantation, how even the wind seemed green, how the branches came alive. Her feet pounded like thunder, her dress whipping through the air. She danced as she had for Picasso in the Albaicin, as she had for Jordi, in the firelight, on their last night together in the ruins at Sagunto. There she had felt the warmth of the ancient stones answer the life in her limbs. That had been her greatest dance, she knew, her passion, her love, drawing the spirits of the earth, the ghosts from the ruins.

SPAIN--- SOMETHING WONDERFUL: The seduction of white flowers Woodsmoke and saffron Lavender mountains, cranberry sunsets Blue domes Lemon trees Floating bridges Immense night skies pricked with stars...

Maybe you’ve wondered why I always stuck faithfully with rose as my perfume. You know, in the midst of holy war, soldiers returning from the Crusades carried damask roses home with them. I loved that. I like to think they were bringing them to the women they had loved and left behind. You know, perfume is love. Cleopatra drenched the sails of her golden barge in the fragrance of roses, and when she visited Rome, the perfume lingered in the streets long afterward. Perfume is romance— that is why I fell for the rose.

The hillside blushed rose around them, the earth salmon pink, umber, peach, dotted with sage green and silver trees, dusted with white powder like the cheek of a courtesan.

I was looking into scent scales on butterfly wings at first--- you know they release chemicals, pheromones, to attract females?" Charles had explained his theories a hundred times, but Emma humored him. "It sounds fascinating, Uncle Charles." "Not bad for little creatures who weigh the same as two rose petals and only live for a matter of days.

Some perfumes are, like children, innocent, as sweet as oboes, green as meadow sward— Baudelaire.” It was still Emma’s signature scent. On her it smelled like rain in a garden at first, fresh and intoxicating; then as the green top notes evaporated Emma always thought of the earth, of picking flowers in a forest with her mother. The heart note of lily of the valley and jasmine melded perfectly with the base note of sandalwood and musk. Liberty always said the scent was like her— shy but surprisingly fierce.

As her mother hugged her, Emma breathed in the scent of her perfume. Roses--- Liberty always smelled like a rose garden in full bloom to her: warm, sunlit, a pure soliflore.