Lilac Smell Quotes

You shine like the sun and you move like water. Your eyes are the perfect mix of gray and brown, like fog in the woods, and you smell like lilacs in the summer. I think if you laughed, it would sound like music.

A black cat among roses, phlox, lilac-misted under a quarter moon, the sweet smells of heliotrope and night-scented stock. The garden is very still. It is dazed with moonlight, contented with perfume...

my mind is a big hunk of irrevocable nothing which touch and taste and smell and hearing and sight keep hitting and chipping with sharp fatal tools in an agony of sensual chisels i perform squirms of chrome and ex -ecute strides of cobalt nevertheless i feel that i cleverly am being altered that i slightly am becoming something a little different, in fact myself hereupon helpless i utter lilac shrieks and scarlet bellowings

I remember walking across Sixty-second Street one twilight that first spring, or the second spring, they were all alike for a while. I was late to meet someone but I stopped at Lexington Avenue and bought a peach and stood on the corner eating it and knew that I had come out out of the West and reached the mirage. I could taste the peach and feel the soft air blowing from a subway grating on my legs and I could smell lilac and garbage and expensive perfume and I knew that it would cost something sooner or later—because I did not belong there, did not come from there—but when you are twenty-two or twenty-three, you figure that later you will have a high emotional balance, and be able to pay whatever it costs. I still believed in possibilities then, still had the sense, so peculiar to New York, that something extraordinary would happen any minute, any day, any month.

A faint smell of lilac filled the air. There was always lilac in this part of town. Where there were grandmothers, there was always lilac.

…quite simply, I was in love with New York. I do not mean "love" in any colloquial way, I mean that I was in love with the city, the way you love the first person who ever touches you and you never love anyone quite that way again. I remember walking across Sixty-second Street one twilight that first spring, or the second spring, they were all alike for a while. I was late to meet someone but I stopped at Lexington Avenue and bought a peach and stood on the corner eating it and knew that I had come out out of the West and reached the mirage. I could taste the peach and feel the soft air blowing from a subway grating on my legs and I could smell lilac and garbage and expensive perfume and I knew that it would cost something sooner or later—because I did not belong there, did not come from there

And the lost heart stiffens and rejoices in the lost lilac and the lost sea voices and the weak spirit quickens to rebel for the bent golden-rod and the lost sea smell quickens to recover.

...and from then on whenever he smells lilacs he'll think about this moment. How the bees were circling above him, how purple the ink on the leaflets he's been distributing suddenly seemed, how he realized, all at once, just how beautiful a woman can be.

A heavy smell of sour wine, candles and overripe fruit hung in the air. And something else, that bought to mind a mixture of the scents of lilac and gooseberries.

When you chopped logs with the ax and they split open they smelled beautiful, like Christmas. But when you split someone's head open it smelled like abattoir and quite overpowered the scent of the wild lilacs you'd cut and brought into the house only this morning, which was already another life.

The peace of Manderley. The quietude and the grace. Whoever lived within its walls, whatever trouble there was and strife, however much uneasiness and pain, no matter what tears were shed, what sorrows borne, the peace of Manderley could not be broken or the loveliness destroyed. The flowers that died would bloom again another year, the same birds build their nests, the same trees blossom. That old quiet moss smell would linger in the air, and the bees would come, and crickets, the herons build their nests in the deep dark woods. The butterflies would dance their merry jug across the lawns, and spiders spin foggy webs, and small startled rabbits who had no business to come trespassing poke their faces through the crowded shrubs. There would be lilac, and honeysuckle still, and the white magnolia buds unfolding slow and tight beneath the dining-room window. No one would ever hurt Manderley. It would lie always in its hollow like an enchanted thing, guarded by the woods, safe, secure, while the sea broke and ran and came again in the little shingle bays below.

I could hear the crickets and tree frogs starting their night song in the small, wooded area behind us. A faint smell of lilac filled the air. There was always lilac in this part of town. Where there were grandmothers, there was always lilac.

I miss the floral scent of her hair, the perfume that barely masked the underlying truth of what she was. She was lost time. She smelled of dusty libraries and unwound clocks, salted sand and rain riding on the first rays of dawn. And lilac. When she held me to her, lilac was what I smelled first.

Five minutes later, the girls stood at the open kitchen door, blinking in the brilliant overcast light. The smell of lilacs, roses, sweet peas, and honeysuckle mixed with the scent of crisp late summer leaves. None of them had been in the gradens for nine months, and the bright saturated greens, reds, and violets overwhelmed them. It reminded Azalea of Mother, beautiful and bright, thick with scents and excitement. And the King-he was like the palace behind them, all straights and grays, stiff and symmetrical and orderly. "It's really allowed?" said Flora, her eyes alight at the colors. "Allowed allowed?" said Goldenrod. "For the last time," said the King, pushing them gently out the kitchen door and onto the path. "It is Royal Business! Go On. Get some color in your cheeks.

Life is short, and life is beautiful, and everything is lovely. Love it, embrace it, smell the lilacs, play with the dog, and love endlessly and fiercely with everything you've got. Live without regret.

Dear friend…' The Witcher swore quietly, looking at the sharp, angular, even runes drawn with energetic sweeps of the pen, faultlessly reflecting the author’s mood. He felt once again the desire to try to bite his own backside in fury. When he was writing to the sorceress a month ago he had spent two nights in a row contemplating how best to begin. Finally, he had decided on “Dear friend.” Now he had his just deserts. 'Dear friend, your unexpected letter – which I received not quite three years after we last saw each other – has given me much joy. My joy is all the greater as various rumours have been circulating about your sudden and violent death. It is a good thing that you have decided to disclaim them by writing to me; it is a good thing, too, that you are doing so so soon. From your letter it appears that you have lived a peaceful, wonderfully boring life, devoid of all sensation. These days such a life is a real privilege, dear friend, and I am happy that you have managed to achieve it. I was touched by the sudden concern which you deigned to show as to my health, dear friend. I hasten with the news that, yes, I now feel well; the period of indisposition is behind me, I have dealt with the difficulties, the description of which I shall not bore you with. It worries and troubles me very much that the unexpected present you received from Fate brings you worries. Your supposition that this requires professional help is absolutely correct. Although your description of the difficulty – quite understandably – is enigmatic, I am sure I know the Source of the problem. And I agree with your opinion that the help of yet another magician is absolutely necessary. I feel honoured to be the second to whom you turn. What have I done to deserve to be so high on your list? Rest assured, my dear friend; and if you had the intention of supplicating the help of additional magicians, abandon it because there is no need. I leave without delay, and go to the place which you indicated in an oblique yet, to me, understandable way. It goes without saying that I leave in absolute secrecy and with great caution. I will surmise the nature of the trouble on the spot and will do all that is in my power to calm the gushing source. I shall try, in so doing, not to appear any worse than other ladies to whom you have turned, are turning or usually turn with your supplications. I am, after all, your dear friend. Your valuable friendship is too important to me to disappoint you, dear friend. Should you, in the next few years, wish to write to me, do not hesitate for a moment. Your letters invariably give me boundless pleasure. Your friend Yennefer' The letter smelled of lilac and gooseberries. Geralt cursed.

The warm bittersweet smell of clean Negro welcomed us as we entered the churchyard-Hearts of Love hairdressing mingled with asafoetida, snuff, Hoyt's Cologne, Brown's Mule, peppermint, and lilac talcum.

Maybe it's the TV commercials. They make you hate everything they try to sell. God, they must think the public is a halfwit. Every time some jerk in a white coat with a stethoscope hanging around his neck holds up some toothpaste or a pack of cigarettes or a bottle of beer or a mouthwash or a jar of shampoo or a little box of something that makes a fat wrestler smell like mountain lilac I always make note never to buy any. Hell, I wouldn't buy the product even if I liked it.

If there are words for all the pastels in a hue—the lavenders, mauves, fushsias, plums, and lilacs—who will name the tones and tints of a smell? It's as if we were hypnotized en masse and told to selectively forget. It may be, too, that smells move us so profoundly, in part, because we cannot utter their names. In a world sayable and lush, where marvels offer themselves up readily for verbal dissection, smells are often right on the tip of our tongues—but no closer—and it gives them a kind of magical distance, a mystery, a power without a name, a sacredness.

Quite simply, I was in love with New York. I do not mean “love” in any colloquial way, I mean that I was in love with the city, the way you love the first person who ever touches you and you never love anyone quite that way again. I remember walking across Sixty-second Street one twilight that first spring, or the second spring, they were all alike for a while. I was late to meet someone but I stopped at Lexington Avenue and bought a peach and stood on the corner eating it and knew that I had come out out of the West and reached the mirage. I could taste the peach and feel the soft air blowing from a subway grating on my legs and I could smell lilac and garbage and expensive perfume and I knew that it would cost something sooner or later – because I did not belong there, did not come from there – but when you are twenty-two or twenty-three, you figure that later you will have a high emotional balance, and be able to pay whatever it costs. I still believed in possibilities then, still had the sense, so peculiar to New York, that something extraordinary would happen any minute, any day, any month.

We were in the woods, and not a parent or a friend on earth knew where. At this moment, we were untraceable, this notion an odd pleasure. A patch of fallen leaves glowed in a pool of golden sun, and the dim forest air smelled sweet, of young lilac, invisible sage.

You're suddenly quiet." He watched her swallow. "I don't understand how you do this to me." He leaned in slightly. His hair smelled like something flowery, like the fading scent of lilacs. "Do what?" "Your touch." "I'm not touching you, Emily." She turned around. "That's just it. It feels like you are. How do you do that? It's like you have something I can't see, that reaches out. It doesn't make sense." That startled him. She felt it. No one had ever felt it before.

And I... Why, it doesn’t matter, because Essi smells of verbena, not lilac and gooseberry, doesn’t have cool, electrifying skin. Essi’s hair is not a black tornado of gleaming curls, Essi’s eyes are gorgeous, soft, warm and cornflower blue; they don’t blaze with a cold, unemotional, deep violet. Essi will fall asleep afterwards, turn her head away, open her mouth slightly, Essi will not smile in triumph. For Essi... Essi is not Yennefer.

I grabbed it and held it to my face and there,God,yes.Her smell.The lilac shampoo and the almond in her skin lotion and benneath all of that the faint sweetness of the skin itself.

Power smelling of lilac and cedar and the first bits of green, swirled around me.

Lundy suspected she would never again smell lilacs without feeling her mother’s palm against her cheek, and she didn’t mind. Some forms of fair value are less tangible than others.)

A little sacrifice, he thought, just a little sacrifice. For this will calm her, a hug, a kiss, calm caresses. She doesn’t want anything more. And even if she did, what of it? For a little sacrifice, a very little sacrifice, is beautiful and worth… Were she to want more… It would calm her. A quiet, calm, gentle act of love. And I… Why, it doesn’t matter, because Essi smells of verbena, not lilac and gooseberry, doesn’t have cool, electrifying skin. Essi’s hair is not a black tornado of gleaming curls, Essi’s eyes are gorgeous, soft, warm and cornflower blue; they don’t blaze with a cold, unemotional, deep violet. Essi will fall asleep afterwards, turn her head away, open her mouth slightly, Essi will not smile in triumph. For Essi… Essi is not Yennefer.

Color—that’s another thing people don’t expect. In her imagination, in her dreams, everything has color. The museum buildings are beige, chestnut, hazel. Its scientists are lilac and lemon yellow and fox brown. Piano chords loll in the speaker of the wireless in the guard station, projecting rich blacks and complicated blues down the hall toward the key pound. Church bells send arcs of bronze careening off the windows. Bees are silver; pigeons are ginger and auburn and occasionally golden. The huge cypress trees she and her father pass on their morning walk are shimmering kaleidoscopes, each needle a polygon of light. She has no memories of her mother but imagines her as white, a soundless brilliance. Her father radiates a thousand colors, opal, strawberry red, deep russet, wild green; a smell like oil and metal, the feel of a lock tumbler sliding home, the sound of his key rings chiming as he walks. He is an olive green when he talks to a department head, an escalating series of oranges when he speaks to Mademoiselle Fleury from the greenhouses, a bright red when he tries to cook. He glows sapphire when he sits over his workbench in the evenings, humming almost inaudibly as he works, the tip of his cigarette gleaming a prismatic blue.

She wants lilacs in her wedding bouquet." "Okay . . ." Nevada had said she wanted carnations, but we could stuff some pretty pink lilacs in there. I didn’t see the problem. "Blue," Arabella squeezed out. "She wants blue lilacs." No and also no. "Nevada . . ." "I had to hide in a bush of French lilacs yesterday and they were very pretty and smelled nice. The card on the tree said, ‘Wonder Blue: prolific in bloom and lush in perfume.’" I googled French lilac, Wonder Blue. It was blue. Like in your face blue. "Why were you hiding in a bush?" "She was being shot at," Arabella said with a sour face. "So you stopped to smell the lilacs while people were shooting at you?" I couldn’t even.

She leant over him, touched him. He felt her hair, smelling of lilac and gooseberries, brush his face and he suddenly knew that he’d never forget that scent, that soft touch, knew that he’d never be able to compare it to any other scent or touch. Yennefer kissed him and he understood that he’d never desire any lips other than hers, so soft and moist, sweet with lipstick. He knew that, from that moment, only she would exist, her neck, shoulders and breasts freed from her black dress, her delicate, cool skin, which couldn’t be compared to any other he had ever touched. He gazed into her violet eyes, the most beautiful eyes in the world, eyes which he feared would become . . . Everything. He knew.

Sunlight’s warmth on my face awoke me in the morning. I didn’t remember falling asleep or how I came to be in my own bed. But I did recall nightmares. Awful nightmares featuring Gwen. I turned my head to stare out an open window where the sun shone in full splendor, bleaching a clear sky enough to tell it was going to be a beautiful spring day. The air smelled of rain from overnight showers, mixed with a strong floral scent. A large lilac bush outside was responsible for the perfume. I breathed in the clean and fragrant air. My eyelids fluttered, blinking at a stunning reflection of daylight off the glass. The blue beyond gave an exquisite glow to my room. All of it was an invitation to bask in a new day—an invitation I declined because none of that mattered to me. The world might as well come to a dark and ugly end. I saw no reason for beauty or life to go on so long as Gwen was lost. Rolling over in bed, I felt the vice grips wrench at my heart again as I cried myself back to sleep. from Phantom's Veil

Breathe, Cassie, breathe. He has a good face. Not the face of someone who wants to hurt you. If he wanted to hurt you, he wouldn't have brought you here and stuck an IV in you to keep you hydrated, and the sheets feel nice and clean, and so what took your clothes and dressed you in this cotton nightie, what did you expect him to do? Your clothes were filthy, like you, only you're not anymore, and your skin smells a little like lilacs, which means holy Christ he BATHED you.

Not to waste the spring I threw down everything, And ran into the open world To sing what I could sing... To dance what I could dance! And join with everyone! I wandered with a reckless heart beneath the newborn sun. First stepping through the blushing dawn, I crossed beneath a garden bower, counting every hermit thrush, counting every hour. When morning's light was ripe at last, I stumbled on with reckless feet; and found two nymphs engaged in play, approaching them stirred no retreat. With naked skin, their weaving hands, in form akin to Calliope's maids, shook winter currents from their hair to weave within them vernal braids. I grabbed the first, who seemed the stronger by her soft and dewy leg, and swore blind eyes, Lest I find I, before Diana, a hunted stag. But the nymphs they laughed, and shook their heads. and begged I drop beseeching hands. For one was no goddess, the other no huntress, merely two girls at play in the early day. "Please come to us, with unblinded eyes, and raise your ready lips. We will wash your mouth with watery sighs, weave you springtime with our fingertips." So the nymphs they spoke, we kissed and laid, by noontime's hour, our love was made, Like braided chains of crocus stems, We lay entwined, I laid with them, Our breath, one glassy, tideless sea, Our bodies draping wearily. We slept, I slept so lucidly, with hopes to stay this memory. I woke in dusty afternoon, Alone, the nymphs had left too soon, I searched where perched upon my knees Heard only larks' songs in the trees. "Be you, the larks, my far-flung maids? With lilac feet and branchlike braids... Who sing sweet odes to my elation, in your larking exaltation!" With these, my clumsy, carefree words, The birds they stirred and flew away, "Be I, poor Actaeon," I cried, "Be dead… Before they, like Hippodamia, be gone astray!" Yet these words, too late, remained unheard, By lark, that parting, morning bird. I looked upon its parting flight, and smelled the coming of the night; desirous, I gazed upon its jaunt, as Leander gazes Hellespont. Now the hour was ripe and dark, sensuous memories of sunlight past, I stood alone in garden bowers and asked the value of my hours. Time was spent or time was tossed, Life was loved and life was lost. I kissed the flesh of tender girls, I heard the songs of vernal birds. I gazed upon the blushing light, aware of day before the night. So let me ask and hear a thought: Did I live the spring I’d sought? It's true in joy, I walked along, took part in dance, and sang the song. and never tried to bind an hour to my borrowed garden bower; nor did I once entreat a day to slumber at my feet. Yet days aren't lulled by lyric song, like morning birds they pass along, o'er crests of trees, to none belong; o'er crests of trees of drying dew, their larking flight, my hands, eschew Thus I'll say it once and true… From all that I saw, and everywhere I wandered, I learned that time cannot be spent, It only can be squandered.

Southern girls know the sweet smell of summer… Confederate jasmine Sweet wisteria Purple lilac Suntan lotion

She smells like the lilacs that grow down by the lake, and she feels like heaven. She feels like home. She feels like she’s finally mine.

Once again I felt light-headed, but this time it wasn't from the scent of lilacs; it was from the scent of my own death.

shade. Sweet-smelling Carolina allspice, with its reddish-black flowers, lilacs, honeysuckle and

That smelled like lilacs, that captured the blue of her eyes and the length of her eyelashes.

A sensitive nose isn’t always that great a gift. Plenty of smells are better unsmelt.

As the lilac-scented breeze carries the memories...there remains the lingering reminder of the times we hold in deep...for to love deeply and live deeply.... is to smell the fragrance of life.....

But I did know that nobody ever asked me what I wanted for Christmas. Had any adult with the power to fulfill my desires taken me seriously and asked me what I wanted, they would have known that I did not want to have anything to own, or to possess any object. I wanted rather to feel something on Christmas day. The real question would have been, "Dear Claudia, what experience would you like on Christmas?" I could have spoken up, "I want to sit on the low stool in Big Mama's kitchen with my lap full of lilacs and listen to Big Papa play his violin for me alone." The lowness of the stool made for my body, the security and warmth of Big Mama's kitchen, the smell of the lilacs, the sound of music, and, since it would be good to have all my senses engaged, the taste of peach, perhaps, afterward.

I reached the privy and emptied the slop pail, and so forth. And so forth, Grace? asks Dr.Jordan. I look at him. Really if he does not know what you do in a privy there is no hope for him. What I did was, I hoisted my skirts and sat down above the buzzing flies, on the same seat everyone in the house sat on, lady or lady's maid, they both piss and it smells the same, and not like lilac neither, as Mary Whitney used to say. What was in there for wiping was an old copy of the Godey's Ladies' Book; I always looked at the pictures before using them. Most were of the latest fashions, but some were of duchesses from England and high-society ladies in New York and the like. You should never let your picture be in a magazine or newspaper if you can help it, as you never know what ends your face may be made to serve, by others, once it has got out of your control. But I do not say any of this to Dr. Jordan. And so forth, I say firmly, because And so forth is all he is entitled to. Just because he pesters me to know everything is no reason for me to tell him.

The Germans sometimes chose to disguise mustard with xylyl bromide, a tear gas that smells like lilac, and so it came to pass in the wartime spring that men ran in terror from a breeze scented with blossoming lilac shrubs.

The suburban evening was grey and yellow on Sunday; the gardens of the small houses to left and right were rank with ivy and tall grass and lilac bushes; the tropical South London verdure was dusty above and mouldy below; the tepid air swarmed with flies. Eeldrop, at the window, welcomed the smoky smell of lilac, the gramaphones, the choir of the Baptist chapel, and the sight of three small girls playing cards on the steps of the police station.

At first Alexander could not believe it was his Tania. He blinked and tried to refocus his eyes. She was walking around the table, gesturing, showing, leaning forward, bending over. At one point she straightened out and wiped her forehead. She was wearing a short-sleeved yellow peasant dress. She was barefoot, and her slender legs were exposed above her knee. Her bare arms were lightly tanned. Her blonde hair looked bleached by the sun and was parted into two shoulder-length braids tucked behind her ears. Even from a distance he could see the summer freckles on her nose. She was achingly beautiful. And alive. Alexander closed his eyes, then opened them again. She was still there, bending over the boy’s work. She said something, everyone laughed loudly, and Alexander watched as the boy’s arm touched Tatiana’s back. Tatiana smiled. Her white teeth sparkled like the rest of her. Alexander didn’t know what to do. She was alive, that was obvious. Then why hadn’t she written him? And where was Dasha? Alexander couldn’t very well continue to stand under a lilac tree. He went back out onto the main road, took a deep breath, stubbed out his cigarette, and walked toward the square, never taking his eyes off her braids. His heart was thundering in his chest, as if he were going into battle. Tatiana looked up, saw him, and covered her face with her hands. Alexander watched everyone get up and rush to her, the old ladies showing unexpected agility and speed. She pushed them all away, pushed the table away, pushed the bench away, and ran to him. Alexander was paralyzed by his emotion. He wanted to smile, but he thought any second he was going to fall to his knees and cry. He dropped all his gear, including his rifle. God, he thought, in a second I’m going to feel her. And that’s when he smiled. Tatiana sprang into his open arms, and Alexander, lifting her off her feet with the force of his embrace, couldn’t hug her tight enough, couldn’t breathe in enough of her. She flung her arms around his neck, burying her face in his bearded cheek. Dry sobs racked her entire body. She was heavier than the last time he felt her in all her clothes as he lifted her into the Lake Ladoga truck. She, with her boots, her clothes, coats, and coverings, had not weighed what she weighed now. She smelled incredible. She smelled of soap and sunshine and caramelized sugar. She felt incredible. Holding her to him, Alexander rubbed his face into her braids, murmuring a few pointless words. “Shh, shh…come on, now, shh, Tatia. Please…” His voice broke. “Oh, Alexander,” Tatiana said softly into his neck. She was clutching the back of his head. “You’re alive. Thank God.” “Oh, Tatiana,” Alexander said, hugging her tighter, if that were possible, his arms swaddling her summer body. “You’re alive. Thank God.” His hands ran up to her neck and down to the small of her back. Her dress was made of very thin cotton. He could almost feel her skin through it. She felt very soft. Finally he let her feet touch the ground. Tatiana looked up at him. His hands remained around her little waist. He wasn’t letting go of her. Was she always this tiny, standing barefoot in front of him? “I like your beard,” Tatiana said, smiling shyly and touching his face. “I love your hair,” Alexander said, pulling on a braid and smiling back. “You’re messy…” He looked her over. “And you’re stunning.” He could not take his eyes off her glorious, eager, vivid lips. They were the color of July tomatoes— He bent to her—

Sometimes Daddy would bring me a still-warm deer heart in a bowl and let me touch it with my fingers. I would put my lips to it and kiss its smooth, pink flesh, hoping to feel it beating, but it was all beat out. Mama would call him Daniel Boone as she laughed into his bare neck and he twirled his bloody fingers through her hair and they danced around the kitchen. Mama was the kind of person who put wildflowers in whiskey bottles. Lupine and foxglove in the kitchen, lilacs in the bathroom. She smelled like marshy muskeg after a hard rain, and even with blood in her hair, she was beautiful.

But why didn't Gram tell us our mother wore a perfume that smelled like sunshine? That she slept in the garden in the springtime? That she made pesto with walnuts? why did she keep this real-life mother from us? But as soon as I ask the question, I know the answer, because suddenly there is not blood pumping in my veins, coursing all throughout my body, but longing for a mother who loves lilacs. Longing like I've never had for the Paige walker who wanders that world. That Paige Walker never made me feel like a daughter, but a mother who boils water for pasta does. Except don't you need to be claimed to be a daughter? Don't you need to be loved?

The first thing she noticed when the light popped on was that the wallpaper had rows and rows of tiny lilacs on it, like scratch-and-sniff paper, and the room actually smelled a little like lilacs. There was a four-poster bed against the wall, the torn, gauzy remnants of what had once been a canopy now hanging off the posts like maypoles.

Letting go of the pipe in the laundry room, he could feel in his throat so many sentences from the night's reading of emails, and he needed to shout them at her now as she poured her coffee in the kitchen, its smell always such a comfort to him, but not then; that morning it was like the sweet fragrance of lilacs just before you see the corpse upon which they lie.

Reinhart rubbed his face with his hand. He could still smell her light, flowery scent, like springtime and lilacs, could still feel her in his arms, and his heart skipped a beat. Seeing her dangling from the balcony, hanging over that deep ravine, knowing she was one moment away from death, sent a bolt of lightning through his veins. Thank You, God. He had arrived in time. He

Armpits smell of linden blossom, lilacs give a whiff of ink. If only we could wage love-making all day long without end, love so detailed and elastic that when the nightfall came, we would exchange each other like prisoners of war, five times, no less! — Vera Pavlova, “53,” If There is Something to Desire: One Hundred Poems. Translated by Steven Seymour. (Knopf; 1St Edition edition January 19, 2010)

The singing of birds became an orchestra- a symphony of gossip and mirth. I'd never heard so many layers of music, never heard the variations and themes that wove between their arpeggios. And beyond the birdsong, there was an ethereal melody- a woman, melancholy and weary... the willow. Gasping, I opened my eyes. The world had become richer, clearer. The brook was a near-invisible rainbow of water that flowed over stones as invitingly smooth as silk. The trees were clothed in a faint shimmer that radiated from their centres and danced along the edges of their leaves. There was no tangy metallic stench- no, the smell of magic had become like jasmine, like lilac, like roses. I would never be able to paint it, the richness, the feel- Maybe fractions of it, but not the whole thing. Magic- everything was magic, and it broke my heart.

The ragged cat drags its belly across where the grass is short and the stones are sharp, under the lilacs that have no flowers. The flower smell is gone and the white falls off the trees. Seeds, Lark says, little seeds with parachutes to fly them, Termite, all in your hair, and she runs her fingers through his hair, saying how long and how pretty. He wants the grass long and strong, sounding whispers when it moves, but the mower cuts it. The mower cuts and cuts like a yowling knife. He hears the mower cutting and smells the grass pouring out all over the ground, the green stain so sharp and wet it spills and spills. The mower cuts everything away and Nick Tucci follows the mower, cutting and cutting while the orange cat growls low to move its soft parts across the chipped sharp stones. Deep under the lilacs where no one sees, the orange cat waits for the roar to stop.

Lilac. Love smells like lilac. Love is lilac. My head may have forgotten that field, but my heart hadn’t. It had been trying to tell me all along. I’d found my haven all over again in three broken rock gods. When the world wrote off my pain, I could run to them and forget. They’d be my shelter, my peace, and my solace. I could sing, I could sleep, I could laugh, I could cry. In their arms, I could just be. All I needed to know was why they weren’t here now.

The Garden by Moonlight" A black cat among roses, Phlox, lilac-misted under a first-quarter moon, The sweet smells of heliotrope and night-scented stock. The garden is very still, It is dazed with moonlight, Contented with perfume, Dreaming the opium dreams of its folded poppies. Firefly lights open and vanish High as the tip buds of the golden glow Low as the sweet alyssum flowers at my feet. Moon-shimmer on leaves and trellises, Moon-spikes shafting through the snow ball bush. Only the little faces of the ladies’ delight are alert and staring, Only the cat, padding between the roses, Shakes a branch and breaks the chequered pattern As water is broken by the falling of a leaf. Then you come, And you are quiet like the garden, And white like the alyssum flowers, And beautiful as the silent sparks of the fireflies. Ah, Beloved, do you see those orange lilies? They knew my mother, But who belonging to me will they know When I am gone.

Savannah, darlin’?” “Yes, Mama. Come in.” Her mother opened the door a crack, then slipped into the room, carrying the largest, most extravagant bouquet of wildflowers Savannah had ever seen. Wildflowers that smelled of lilac and honeysuckle and the outdoors. She breathed deeply and sighed, looking at her mother in question. “Asher Lee,” she said, “is downstairs.” Savannah felt her mouth tilt up into an involuntary smile and her eyes flood with tears. Her mother set the bouquet on her vanity and put her arm around Savannah. “Whatever he did, he’s awful sorry, button.” “He yelled at me and made me cry.” “Guessing he didn’t mean whatever it is he said.” “He thinks I want him to change.” “Well, of course you do,” said her mother matter-of-factly, swiping at Savannah’s tears with the corner of her sunflower apron. “We all want to change the men we love. Leave our mark on them.” “Oh, I don’t lov—” “Of course you don’t. I was just makin’ conversation.

The girl sitting on my chest appeared to be a few years older than me, maybe fourteen or fifteen, with thick dark hair and incredibly blue eyes. Her skin was flawless, her cheekbones were sculpted, and her lips were full. She was slight of build—almost delicate—and yet she’d been powerful enough to flatten me in half a second. She even smelled incredible, an intoxicating combination of lilacs and gunpowder. But perhaps the most attractive thing about her was how calm and confident she was in the midst of a life-or-death situation.

I learned later on that sometimes the body reacts to high doses of radiation by blocking the function of certain organs. At the time I thought of my mother, who’s seventy-four and can’t smell, and I figured this had happened to me too. I asked the others, there were three of us: “How do the apple trees smell?” “They don’t smell like anything.” Something was happening to us. The lilacs didn’t smell—lilacs! And I got this sense that everything around me was fake. That I was on a film set. And that I couldn’t understand it. I’d never even read about anything like it.

If you had to lose everything, what would you miss most? It wouldn't be anything gross, like the big house, or the fancy car, assuming you had such things. It wouldn't be your impeccable reputation, or fame, or the regard of others. No; if you had to lose everything – I mean EVERYTHING – it would be the things you most take for granted now that you would miss. It would be different for each person, and it would probably surprise you to know what it was: a lilac tree in flower, the sound of a train in the distance, the smell of marmalade or hot buttered toast. Rain on a windowpane. A fruit thingummy.

A Letter To Say, "I'll See You Later" I remember just like it was yesterday the grapevine, clothesline, lilacs and peonies. I remember the secret hiding place for 50-cent pieces. I remember just like it was yesterday the color wheel Christmas Tree, The Honeymooner’s, The Dukes of Hazzard and Jeopardy! I remember just like it was yesterday the house was full of children, but I was your only and your favorite. You always made time for me, even when I deserved the fly swatter. I remember just like it was yesterday falling asleep to the scent of Dove soap on your pillow, you lying for me so I wouldn’t be abused again. I remember just like it was yesterday your big “Black Cat” and the late, dark nights driving to IFP and knowing there was “No Place Like Home.” I remember just like it was yesterday the “horns” in your ‘do and the smell of Raffinee wafting through the house and Listerine in the bathroom. I remember your bows and polka dots and “just a few fries.” I remember the green blanket. I remember just like it was yesterday the way it felt to sit on your lap and have you sing “She’s Grandma’s Little Baby.” I remember just like it was yesterday the day you told me I could “Shit in the sugar bowl.” I remember just like it was yesterday telling you that you were going to be a great-grandma…for the first time. I remember just like it was yesterday the 1st time you held him in your arms; you helped me raise him. Your house was always our home. I remember just like it was yesterday having my heart broken but you helped me mend it. I remember just like it was yesterday asking for your help when I couldn’t do it on my own; you’ve always been my rock. I remember just like it was yesterday confiding my secrets to you – you were the first to know another baby was on the way, this time a girl. I remember just like it was yesterday the joy they brought to your life; they were the reason you didn’t give up. I remember just like it was yesterday saying words I never meant, not spending more time with you because my life got in the way. I remember just like it was yesterday you loving on me, your strength and vitality, your faith, hope and kindness. I remember just like it was yesterday wishing for more tomorrows so I could tell you that I love you another time. I remember just like it was yesterday having you tell me you love me, “more than anyone will ever know.” I remember just like it was yesterday you taught me to never say good-bye, just say “I’ll see you later.

Color—that’s another thing people don’t expect. In her imagination, in her dreams, everything has color. The museum buildings are beige, chestnut, hazel. Its scientists are lilac and lemon yellow and fox brown. Piano chords loll in the speaker of the wireless in the guard station, projecting rich blacks and complicated blues down the hall toward the key pound. Church bells send arcs of bronze careening off the windows. Bees are silver; pigeons are ginger and auburn and occasionally golden. The huge cypress trees she and her father pass on their morning walk are shimmering kaleidoscopes, each needle a polygon of light. She has no memories of her mother but imagines her as white, a soundless brilliance. Her father radiates a thousand colors, opal, strawberry red, deep russet, wild green; a smell like oil and metal, the feel of a lock tumbler sliding home, the sound of his key rings chiming as he walks. He is an olive green when he talks to a department head, an escalating series of oranges when he speaks to Mademoiselle Fleury from the greenhouses, a bright red when he tries to cook. He glows sapphire when he sits over his workbench in the evenings, humming almost inaudibly as he works, the tip of his cigarette gleaming a prismatic blue.

My eye keeps escaping towards the big blue lacquered door that I've had painted in a trompe-l'oeil on the back wall. I would like to call Mrs. Cohen back and tell her there's no problem for her son's bar mitzvah, everything's ready: I would like to go through that door and disappear into the garden my mind's eye has painted behind it. The grass there is soft and sweet, there are bulrushes bowing along the banks of a river. I put lime trees in it, hornbeams, weeping elms, blossoming cherries and liquidambars. I plant it with ancient roses, daffodils, dahlias with their melancholy heavy heads, and flowerbeds of forget-me-nots. Pimpernels, armed with all the courage peculiar to such tiny entities, follow the twists and turns between the stones of a rockery. Triumphant artichokes raise their astonished arrows towards the sky. Apple trees and lilacs blossom at the same time as hellebores and winter magnolias. My garden knows no seasons. It is both hot and cool. Frost goes hand in hand with a shimmering heat haze. The leaves fall and grow again. row and fall again. Wisteria climbs voraciously over tumbledown walls and ancient porches leading to a boxwood alley with a poignant fragrance. The heady smell of fruit hangs in the air. Huge peaches, chubby-cheeked apricots, jewel-like cherries, redcurrants, raspberries, spanking red tomatoes and bristly cardoons feast on sunlight and water, because between the sunbeams it rains in rainbow-colored droplets. At the very end, beyond a painted wooden fence, is a woodland path strewn with brown leaves, protected from the heat of the skies by a wide parasol of foliage fluttering in the breeze. You can't see the end of it, just keep walking, and breathe.

Still grows the vivacious lilac a generation after the door and lintel and the sill are gone, unfolding its sweet-scented flowers each spring, to be plucked by the musing traveller; planted and tended once by children's hands, in front-yard plots—now standing by wallsides in retired pastures, and giving place to new-rising forests;—the last of that stirp, sole survivor of that family. Little did the dusky children think that the puny slip with its two eyes only, which they stuck in the ground in the shadow of the house and daily watered, would root itself so, and outlive them, and house itself in the rear that shaded it, and grown man's garden and orchard, and tell their story faintly to the lone wanderer a half-century after they had grown up and died—blossoming as fair, and smelling as sweet, as in that first spring. I mark its still tender, civil, cheerful lilac colors.

You are in his car and your words taste like honey. The suns yolk is stretching over the road, with hues of pink and red ribbon pressed against the bruises of the sky. He is talking about mechanics or sugar factories, and you are touching the rings on your fingers. The windows are open and the wind is making a home in your bones. Your jeans are ripped, your perfume smells like lilacs, your nails painted the color of sea weed. You forget about noise. You forget about color. It’s your lungs - I think, it’s your lungs that are morphing into purple butter. You are in his car and you are Mozart composing art, Claude Monet painting Water Lilies, you are Aphrodite, you are Shakespeare. You are in his car and you can’t remember what salt feels like against your tongue. You are in his car and you are ocean, fire - lip, tongue, breath, sweat. You are in his car and you are telling him you love him. You are in his car and he is telling you he loves you back.

And we oughtn't to be contrasting the imaginative, dreamy outlook of children with the realism and objectivity of adults. It is children who are the true realists: They never proceed from generalities. The adult recognizes the general form in a particular example, a representative of the species, dismisses everything else and states: that's a lilac, there's an ash tree, an apple tree. The child perceives individuals, personalities. He sees the unique form, and doesn't mask it with a common name or function. When you walk with children they enable you to see the fabulous beasts in tree foliage, to smell the sweetness of blossoms. It isn't a triumph of the imagination, but an unprejudiced, total realism. And Nature becomes instantly poetic. These outings are the absolute reign of childhood. You lose its charm in growing up, because you end by acquiring ideas and certainties about everything, and no longer want to know more of things than their objective representation (sadly called their 'truths').

The road climbs curving out of wet ground thick with cedars, and up onto a plateau meadow where Jersey cows, beautiful as deer, watching them with Juno eyes. Along the trail the ferns are dense, drooping with wet, twenty kinds of them. Again he does not know them (in my experience, ferns are an exclusively feminine expertise), and she tells him: hayscented fern, wood fern, sensitive fern, cinnamon fern, ostrich fern, interrupted fern, Christmas fern, bracken, maidenhair - names that are as pleasant to his ear as the woods smells are to his nose. In the intervals between clumps of spruce, the moss spreads a green carpet, inches thick, feather-soft, with candles of ground pine and the domes of spotted orange mushrooms rising out of it... Those aren't toadstools, Those are mushrooms. Deadly Amanita mushrooms. Ne mangez pas. You know everything that grows here. That's wonderful." Not so wonderful. I grew up here. I grew up in Sewickley, Pennsylvania, too, but I couldn't tell you the name of one thing that grows there. One, maybe Lilacs. You didn't grow up with my mother.

Before reaching it, we would meet the smell of his lilacs, coming out to greet the strangers. From among the fresh green little hearts of their leaves, the flowers would curiously lift above the gate of the park their tufts of mauve or white feathers, glazed, even in the shade, by the sun in which they had bathed. A few, half hidden by the little tiled lodge called the Archers’ House, where the caretaker lived, overtopped its Gothic gable with their pink minarets. The Nymphs of Spring would have seemed vulgar compared to these young houris, which preserved within this French garden the pure and vivid tones of Persian miniatures. Despite my desire to entwine their supple waists and draw down to me the starry curls of their fragrant heads, we would pass by without stopping because my parents had ceased to visit Tansonville since Swann’s marriage… We stopped for a moment in front of the gate. Lilac time was nearly over; a few, still, poured forth in tall mauve chandeliers the delicate bubbles of their flowers, but in many places among the leaves where only a week before they had still been breaking in waves of fragrant foam, a hollow scum now withered, shrunken and dark, dry and odorless.

I was too awestruck to speak. Vines of bright pink flowers danced over a wrought-iron arbor. I recognized them immediately as the very same variety, bougainvillea, that grew in Greenhouse No. 4 at the New York Botanical Garden. Just beyond, two potted trees stood at attention- a lemon, its shiny yellow globes glistening in the sunlight, and what looked like an orange, studded with the tiniest fruit I'd ever seen. "What is this?" I asked, fascinated. "A kumquat," she said. "Lady Anna used to pick them for the children." She reached out to pluck one of the tiny oranges from the tree. "Here, try for yourself." I held it in my hand, admiring its smooth, shiny skin. I sank my teeth into the flesh of the fruit. Its thin skin disintegrated in my mouth, releasing a burst of sweet and sour that made my eyes shoot open and a smile spread across my face. "Oh, my," I said. "I've never had anything like it." Mrs. Dilloway nodded. "You should try the clementines, then. They're Persian." I walked a few paces further, admiring the potted orchids- at least a hundred specimens, so exquisite they looked like Southern belles in hoop skirts. On the far wall were variegated ferns, bleeding hearts, and a lilac tree I could smell from the other end of the room.

Tim bid us good-bye after helping us carry in my three-hundred-pound suitcase, and Marlboro Man and I looked around our quiet house, which was spick-and-span and smelled of fresh paint and leather cowboy boots, which lined the wall near the front door. The entry glowed with the light of the setting sun coming in the window, and I reached down to grab one of my bags so I could carry it to the bedroom. But before my hand made it to the handle, Marlboro Man grabbed me tightly around the waist and carried me over to the leather sofa, where we fell together in a tired heap of jet lag, emotional exhaustion, and--ironically, given the week we’d just endured--a sudden burst of lust. “Welcome home,” he said, nuzzling his face into my neck. Mmmm. This was a familiar feeling. “Thank you,” I said, closing my eyes and savoring every second. As his lips made their way across my neck, I could hear the sweet and reassuring sound of cows in the pasture east of our house. We were home. “You feel so good,” he said, moving his hands to the zipper of my casual black jacket. “You do, too,” I said, stroking the back of his closely cut hair as his arms wrapped more and more tightly around my waist. “But…uh…” I paused. My black jacket was by now on the floor. “I…uh…,” I continued. “I think I need to take a shower.” And I did. I couldn’t do the precise calculation of what it had meant for my hygiene to cross back over the international date line, but as far as I was concerned, I hadn’t showered in a decade. I couldn’t imagine christening our house in such a state. I needed to smell like lilac and lavender and Dove soap on the first night in our little house together. Not airline fuel. Not airports. Not clothes I’d worn for two days straight. Marlboro Man chuckled--the first one I’d heard in many days--and as he’d done so many times during our months of courtship, he touched his forehead to mine. “I need one, too,” he said, a hint of mischief in his voice. And with that, we accompanied each other to the shower, where, with a mix of herbal potions, rural water, and determination, we washed our honeymoon down the drain.

Claire… It is not what you think. Won’t you please allow me to explain? Please. Allow me to speak with you.” It was more tempting than she liked. “There is nothing to say. We both know what I saw.” She paused. “Now go away.” Her tone was as aloof as she could manage between tears that would not stop. She saw the handle turn. “Don’t you dare!” She took a pre-emptive step back. But he did dare. The door opened slowly. “Are you…dressed?” “Of course, I am dressed!” she said furiously. “I am packing. Kindly have a carriage ordered.” It was a lie but he would not know that. Her case was still open on the window seat. He pushed the door open wider. He did not look like a man who had come from the arms of another woman. His face was not flushed with desire. It looked rather drawn in fact. But what did she know of such things? Perhaps that woman had merely exhausted him. “I did not invite her here, Claire. I did not even know she was coming.” He pushed locks of dark hair from his eyes. Claire bit her lip, thinking of how she had looked forward to touching those waves, brushing it possessively off his face herself. “Serafina does what she pleases. As you can see, she has no sense of propriety or discretion. She believes she owns Isabel and I even still. Even though, after her unforgiveable actions, she quite thoroughly relinquished rights to us both some time ago. I do not believe Isabel has pardoned her yet. I certainly will not.” He looked at her, eyes wide and beseeching. Not a hint of pride or arrogance. “She does not want me to be happy without her, Claire,” he said softly. “She must have found out I was to be married and she came with all haste. This is exactly what she was hoping for—or nearly so. When you walked in…” “Oh? Nearly so?” Fury twisted inside her. “I apologize for intruding so unexpectedly, for interrupting your passionate liaison. I suppose if Isabel and I had not walked in, you would still be there even now. On the floor together perhaps.” Thomas looked taken aback, then angry. “Of course not! Do you really think me so…? Is that what you believe, Claire? You did exactly what Serafina hoped you would do. Reacted with anger and jealousy, blamed me, and stormed out.” “Jealousy!” Claire exclaimed, drawing herself up. “I assure you—I am not jealous in the least. If she wants you, she is welcome to have you. I did not want you in the first place, as you will recall.” He flinched. If she did not know better, she might almost have believed him to be hurt. She swallowed hard. “What have I to be jealous of? The fact that you prefer your mistress to…” Oh, no. Her voice was catching in her throat. “…to… me…” She hiccupped embarrassingly, tears flowing over. All of a sudden Thomas’s arms were around her, holding her firmly to his chest. “Claire… No, no…” he whispered. Her cheek was pressed up rather roughly against his tailcoat. He smelled so good. She closed her eyes, her body relaxing against him. There was another smell there. An overpoweringly sweet scent of lilacs. She pushed herself away, hands against his chest. “You smell of her.” He looked horrified. Horrified that he did? Or horrified that she had noticed? Did he smell of her from head to toe? Claire felt nauseous.

Notwithstanding the pressure in the room, this was always an emotional moment for Grace Lyndon, when someone was experiencing a scent she had created. When Grace was a little girl, her mother became very sick and lost her ability to hold down food, and in her final days lost her sight. But her sense of smell remained, strong as ever, and young Grace would bring to her mother's bedside fresh cut flowers, lilac and iris and tea rose, the sweet scents infusing the room with light and earth and memories long forgotten, and Grace brought in special foods to smell, like warm orange-ginger rolls, glazed and fragrant as winter holiday mornings, and cotton linens, laundered in lavender water and line-dried so you could smell the sun in them, and slices of ripe apples, a scent so perfect that in the end, it made her mother cry bittersweetly.

Not knowing what to make of it, he admired her longer. The fact that she’d chosen his bed couldn’t be a coincidence, so he threw caution to the wind and crawled in beneath the blankets. Her hair smelled like lilacs, and when he curled his arms around her, she snuggled in closer against him. While she’d gone to bed in too much clothing—her simple nightshift interrupting the skin-to-skin contact he would have preferred—she was still an improvement over sleeping alone. He nuzzled her once or twice but found her sound asleep, unresponsive aside from a content, indiscernible murmur. The peaceful rhythm of her breathing lulled him to sleep. With his arms around her, he held her safe and secure.

The real question would have been, “Dear Claudia, what experience would you like on Christmas?” I could have spoken up, “I want to sit on the low stool in Big Mama’s kitchen with my lap full of lilacs and listen to Big Papa play his violin for me alone.” The lowness of the stool made for my body, the security and warmth of Big Mama’s kitchen, the smell of the lilacs, the sound of the music, and, since it would be good to have all of my senses engaged, the taste of a peach, perhaps, afterward.

Bottom line, I crossed a line. I took her into my arms and held her longer than necessary, smelled the scent of her hair, felt her heart beat through our clothes and what I wanted to do to her was what no professor should do to his student.

If I was to be limited to the memories of smell I would elaborate for you the brightness of Sagebrush in the rain Sun-soaked brows of laughing children Suburb lawns infused with lilac...

Her warm breath against my skin, tickling the little hairs at my nape, should not have excited me as much as it did. She kept close by me, smelling like lilacs and sunlight, and looking like a dream--- back when my dreams were still good. She was all buttoned-up and stern and accountanty, and Hades, I wanted to unbutton her, wanted to mess up that pristine desk of hers and lay her down on it, papers and books scattering to the floor. Could she tell just by looking at me how badly I wanted to bury my face in her hair? To bury my teeth in her neck, too--- if she allowed it? I could all but taste the way her blood would coat my tongue. Delicious, and so pure. The truth was, I wanted to do a lot of things with Amelia that she hadn't signed up for when we started this arrangement, and had given no indication she wanted with me now. It didn't matter that our kiss had felt like all the good things the centuries had taken from me. Companionship, and warmth. Closeness with another person. My role in her life was limited in duration and scope. And that was how it had to stay, unless and until she said otherwise.

I have laughed more than most folks and I have cried just as much. I have lived hard at times, not so hard at others, and even let some days plumb get away from me. But who has not done the same? I have give and I have took. I have had a good run. The smell of lilacs, cold spring water in my mouth on a hot summer day, the colors of fall, the sound of falling snow. And what of the greatest of all? What of Love? Oh, I have knowed love. . .

I threw open the linen closet in the hallway: just sheets and towels that smelled like mountain streams and lilacs. No murderous freshman.

If heaven existed, she’d just found it. His earthy scent. His stabilizing energy. Nothing smelled better, not even fresh bread from the oven, or a puppy or lilacs in the summer. He filled every crevice in her heart, gluing the broken pieces back together, one breath at a time.

The waves lapped onto the shore in quiet, relentless ripples. A seagull screeched from somewhere down the shoreline, and another bird replied. She missed home, the comfort of her padded swing, her tall shade trees and scented lilac bushes. If she closed her eyes and blocked out the sound of the waves, she could almost imagine that she was back home in her garden, dozing on her swing under the tall oak— “Hey, Meri!” Jake’s voice shattered the illusion. She craned her head around, following the sound of his voice to an upstairs window. His elbows perched lazily on the ledge. She glared up at him. “Meridith.” “Wanna come take a look?” She’d rather beat the smug grin off his face. “Be right there.” Her bones ached as she climbed the main stairway, a repercussion of her night on the hard floor. Just beyond the guest loft, Jake stood in front of the doorway, making some final adjustment to the latch. It looked different with the area closed off from the hall. The smell of wood and some kind of chemical hung in the air. “What do you think?” He’d already hung the drywall, and the patching was drying, which explained the smell. He swung the door open, showing her the thumb-turn on the other side, then closed the door and demonstrated the lock with the key. Thank you, Vanna. “Are both doors keyed the same?” “Yep.” He threw her the new set of keys, and she caught it clumsily. She’d keep one set in her room and find a hiding spot in the kitchen for the other. He gathered his tools and supplies. Now that he was finished, maybe she could take the kids to the driving range. She could teach them how to tee off. Jake capped the drywall compound, then walked through the new doorway toward the family suite. “Where are you going?” Meridith followed him down the hall. “Patching up the other partition.” “I thought you were done.” “If I get them both patched, they’ll be ready to sand and paint on Monday. You got any more of this green?” “What? I don’t know.” He trotted down the back stairway and unlocked the new door’s thumb-turn. Meridith stopped at the top of the steps, sighing. The sooner he finished, the sooner he’d be out of her life. Out of the house, she corrected herself. That man was not in her life.

But when you split someone’s head open it smelled like an abattoir and quite overpowered the scent of the wild lilacs you’d cut and brought into the house only this morning, which was already in another life.

Elegy" Wind buffs the waterstained stone cupids and shakes Old rain from the pines’ low branches, small change Spilling over the graves the years have smashed With a hammer— forget this, forget that, leave no Stone unturned. The grass grows high, sweet-smelling, Many-footed, ever-running. No one tends it. No One comes....And where am I now?.... Is this a beginning, A middle, or an end?.... Before I knew you I stood middle, or an end?.... Before I knew you I stood In this place. Now I forsake the past as I knew it To feed you into it. But that is not right. You step Into it. I find you here, in the shifting grass, In the late light, as if you had always been here. Behind you two torn black cedars flame white Against the darkening fields.... If you turn to me, Quiet man? If you turn? If I speak softly? If I say, Take off, take off your glasses.... Let me see Your sightless eyes?.... I will be beautiful then.... Look, the heart moves as the moths do, scuttering Like a child’s thoughts above this broken stone And that. And I lie down. I lie down in the long grass, Something I am not given to doing, and I feel The weight of your hand on my belly, and the wind Parts the grasses, and the distance spills through— The glassy fields, the black black earth, the pale air Streaming headlong toward the abbey’s far stones And streaming back again.... The drowned scent of lilacs By the abbey, it is a drug. It drives one senseless. It drives one blind. You can cup the enormous lilac cones In your hands— ripened, weightless, and taut— And it is like holding someone’s heart in your hands, Or holding a cloud of moths. I lift them up, my hands. Grave man, bend toward me. Lay your face.... here.... Rest....! took the stalks of the dead wisteria From the glass jar propped against the open grave And put in the shell-shaped yellow wildflowers I picked along the road. I cannot name them. Bread and butter, perhaps. I am not good With names. But nameless you walked toward me And I knew you, a swelling in the heart, A silence in the heart, the wild wind-blown grass Burning— as the sun falls below the earth— Brighter than a bed of lilies struck by snow. — Brigit Pegeen Kelly, The Orchard: Poems (BOA Editions Ltd., 2004)

Her hair smells like lilacs. I pull her against my bare chest. Her legs are warm. I can’t remember the last time my heart was this full, and my mind this at peace.

That’s a whole lot of lilacs.” I looked around. “Is that why death smells like lilacs?” “I don’t know why death smells like that, but lilacs are special. They represent renewal, and both life and death are that—a renewal.” Nektas roamed forward. “If you ever see lilacs like this near water in the mortal realm, you can be assured that you’re near a gateway to Iliseeum—to Dalos, in particular.” I thought of my lake. “And if there are none?” “Then the gateway likely leads to the Shadowlands,

He smelled like ash and lilacs and the faint hint of the faraway sea.

Erica disgruntledly climbed into the compartment and then I got in with her. The only way to fit was to lie on our sides, face-to-face. Except for the part about being fugitives from justice, I found myself quite excited about being in such close quarters with Erica. Despite all our exertion, she smelled fantastic, as usual: her customary heady aroma of lilacs and gunpowder, with only the tiniest hint of formaldehyde mixed in. Meanwhile, Erica looked like she’d rather be locked in a medieval torture device. “Now, no kissing in there, you two,” Catherine teased. “Our safety is at risk.” “Mother!” Erica gasped, horrified. She flushed red as Catherine shut the compartment, casting us into darkness

Dee Dee moved closer to Ash. She smelled the way only a beautiful woman can, like honeysuckle and lilacs and some form of ambrosia. Her proximity was a distraction. He didn’t like that.

The lilacs grew with no care given them, and in the early summer they hung like bunches of mild mauve grapes from branches with leaves like dark green hearts, and the scent of them was so bold and sweet you could smell nothing else, a seasonal mercy.

A little sacrifice, he thought, just a little sacrifice. For this will calm her, a hug, a kiss, calm caresses. She doesn’t want anything more. And even if she did, what of it? For a little sacrifice, a very little sacrifice, is beautiful and worth… Were she to want more… It would calm her. A quiet, calm, gentle act of love. And I… Why, it doesn’t matter, because Essi smells of verbena, not lilac and gooseberry, doesn’t have cool, electrifying skin. Essi’s hair is not a black tornado of gleaming curls, Essi’s eyes are gorgeous, soft, warm and cornflower blue; they don’t blaze with a cold, unemotional, deep violet. Essi will fall asleep afterwards, turn her head away, open her mouth slightly, Essi will not smile in triumph. For Essi… Essi is not Yennefer. And that is why I cannot. I cannot find that little sacrifice inside myself.

Upstairs, Dave Brubeck plays off reels of tape with a smell I’ve come to like.  It’s the opposite of wood. Not earth, but something else. Sharp almost as insecticides yet not as sweet. Fading quickly with time like lilacs. It’s the smell of what’s new like the cameras that my mother brings home. People comes downstairs and I follow him like a shadow. He is swinging a pail.

The Dark Night (XVIII) - 1863-1946 Our love is woven Of a thousand strands— The cool fragrance of the first lilac At morning, The first dew on the grass, The smell of wild mint in the wood, The pungent and earthy smell of ground ivy crushed under our feet; Songs of birds, songs of great poets; The leaping of the red squirrel in the tree, The running of the river, The commotion of stars and clouds in the high winds at night; And dark stillness. It is adorned with all the flowers That stand in our garden; It holds the night and the day. Our love is made Of the South Wind and the West Wind, And the soft falling of rain; Of white April evenings; It is made of trees, And of the many-coloured fields on the hills; Of horizons, Dark sea-blue of the west, thin sky-blue of the east, With a yellow road between. The flames of sunset and sunrise Mingle in the fire of our love.

I did not know why I destroyed those dolls. But I did know that nobody ever asked me what I wanted for Christmas. Had any adult with the power to fulfill my desires taken me seriously and asked me what I wanted, they would have known that I did not want to have anything to own, or to possess any object. I wanted rather to feel something on Christmas day. The real question would have been, “Dear Claudia, what experience would you like on Christmas?” I could have spoken up, “I want to sit on the low stool in Big Mama’s kitchen with my lap full of lilacs and listen to Big Papa play his violin for me alone.” The lowness of the stool made for my body, the security and warmth of Big Mama’s kitchen, the smell of the lilacs, the sound of the music, and, since it would be good to have all of my senses engaged, the taste of a peach, perhaps, afterward.

She opened the window and breathed in the morning air. It had rained a little overnight and everything had been washed clean. Ivy leaves looked lacquered, bee wings hummed in hawthorn blossoms, strings of birdsong seemed to garland the garden, and all was sweet, fresh and bright. Stella could smell newly mown grass, honeysuckle, breaking buds of lilac--- and, yes, frying bacon.

I write my poems with my hands on my breasts smelling the redolent smells of all the lilacs I can get for whatever occasion of appropriate love

I've had a heap o' comfort all my life makin' quilts, and now in my old age I wouldn't take a fortune for 'em. Set down here, child, where you can see out o' the winder and smell the lilacs, and we'll look at 'em all. You see, some folks has albums to put folks' pic tures in to remember :em by, and some folks has a book and writes down the things that happen every day so they won't forgit 'em; but, honey, these quilts is my albums and my di'ries, and whenever the weather's bad and I can't git out to see folks, I jest spread out my quilts and look at 'em and study over 'em, and it's jest like goin' back fifty or sixty years and livin' my life over agin. "There ain't nothin' like a piece o' caliker for bringin' back old times, child, unless it's a flower or a bunch o'thyme or a piece o' pennyroy'l — anything that smells sweet. Why, I can go out yonder in the yard and gether a bunch o' that purple lilac and jest shut my eyes and see faces I ain't seen for fifty years, and somethin' goes through me like a flash o' lightnin', and it seems like I'm young agin jest for that minute.

As it was for him. Their warm, smelly bodies pressed constantly around him and he had to struggle to suppress his own instinctive reactions. At least that was not a reciprocal problem. Even the two who actively disliked him confessed that his natural odor a cross between lemon and lilacs, whatever they were. More than once he caught a crew member inhaling with obvious pleasure in his presence. Their sense of smell was located in twin openings located just above their mouths, which struck Ryo as a particularly impractical arrangement. How odd it would be, he thought amusedly, if understanding should be reached between our species not on the basis of mutual interests or intellectual discourse, but because one of us smells good to the other.

It's 2000, and I'm forty, and I have a real home at last. I've dropped my bags at SL's door. The house itself is composed of his skin and thought. Nearby, lilacs bloom in the garden door. Or are they hyacinths? "My mind forgets / The persons I have been along the way," Borges said. And yet it's those persons - in addition to my I - SL wants to hear about; he says they're a part of who I was. Oh, Lord, don't ever let this end: he smells like no one else on earth, and he sounds like no one else on earth. (SL's voice is so deep that people often ask him to speak up, but he is always speaking up.)

In the arms of a meaningful thing, you find your true warmth, this kind works just like a compass, it tells you where to go and where not to, when to run and when to stay, when to lean in closer and when to get as far away as you can, this kind of warmth it tells you you're safe. look for it in your favorite things, look for it in the feeling you get when you enter home, when you smell your favorite lilac flower, the one you breathe in when you see a blue sky after a rainy day, the kind of warmth you get only from your own safety blanket, the kind you get from your own self. So if you are not, if you are cold, if you are not feeling safe enough, you are on the wrong side, you are heading the wrong direction, your compass is off, you are looking in the wrong place, you are simply settling, and you don't want to settle when it comes to this. Time passes, you keep getting older and this world just keeps getting colder, you may think your skin is getting thicker but it's just not enough, set your record straight, set yourself on the road, find shelter in the right arms, don't settle for a normal kind of hug, settle for arms that sets you off to space.

So the smells I associate with the Elders are freshly cut garden flower arrangements- roses, lilac and endless sweet peas and the fougère hints of random greenery lavishly added to the vases, in the Constance Spry style. Also, modest shop-bought flowers, particularly daffodils, tulips and freesias, which are such an economical way to brighten a room for that thrifty generation. My scents for the elders are: Lavender by Yardley Blue Grass by Elizabeth Arden Rose in Wonderland by Atkinsons Femme by Rochas Ostara by Penhaligon's Tweed by Lenthéric (A mention of this elicited a big response at the event; it seemed all the women had worn it at some time and had happy associations with it. I do wish they would re-release it in the original tweed-fabric effect box.) The men in this age group are the last of the true British gentlemen, so especially for them: Old Spice St Johns Bay Rum by St Johns Fragrance Company Royal Mayfair by Creed

Outside, the sweet smell of freshly cut alfalfa hay was a welcome change from the odours of sweat and cheap cologne on the dance floor.