My friend’s father is a vivid storyteller. When you meet him, you understand where she gets her ability to paint a picture so rosy you want to walk right in and never leave.
Her family splits their time between Silver Lake and Catalina Island. They really know how to live. We call him Captain.
Every time I see him, he impresses something indelible on me. Once it was “that every great city has to have a port,” and explained the geography of downtown Los Angeles. Recently, it was his belief that of the five human senses, each of us has a dominant sense that rises above the others. How differently each of us must process the world. He made it seem like a super power.
I knew what mine was immediately. Olfactory. Smell. Scent.
Frankly, while I love perfume and performing my best Ina smell test when heirloom tomatoes grace the bodega, this response can be highly inconvenient. I can barely make it through a trip to Whole Foods without getting knocked into a Nostalgia reverie. Smell triggers are everywhere!
Eucalyptus leaves in Santa Barbara made redolent by undergrads in sheepskin Uggs. The edge of Old Spice on cool hotel sheets. Lavender and rosemary. Bong water. Bacardi Limon. Bourbon, vanilla, and Marlboro 27s. Fine alkaline dust. Raw Garlic, fresh butter, and Rye bread. Cloves. Warm grass, burning palo santo wood, sunscreen, coco nuit. CK One and matte brown lipstick. Ponds cold cream, the shimmery floral of Covergirl Lipstick in Rose Gold. Sun and spliffs. Foamy Dr. Bronner’s Castille Peppermint Soap awash in the Feather River. Extra used to make a dark pink sugarfree gum that smelled like strawberries. Tiny tuberose dotting a haku lei.
Each of these schizophrenic parings jerks me viscerally to the past whenever I get a good waft of them in the wild. Sometimes it’s completely whimsical and heavenly, being romantically transported by someone spraying organic lavender hand sanitizer while waiting in line to pay $25 for a mound of Mt. Tam. Other times it’s a mortifying ugly cry at the DMV because I caught a whiff of my late grandfather’s aftershave.
There’s one scent that is so intensely imprinted on me, it’s like I was hypnotized with it in a past life or something. Like clockwork, it’s been my seasonal companion for about 16 years.
When I was in 6th grade we moved to Folsom, California from Virginia Beach. California was the compromise between my mother’s desire to remain in Hawai’i where she grew up, and my father’s cabin island fever. This Sacramento suburb was also where Dad was going to retire from his 30 year stint in the Coast Guard. We moved in early summer, driving across the country as a family in our carmel colored Volkswagon. I remember an air condition-less stretch through Arizona, the bravest of us in the Vanagon, wilting and moaning as hot air whipped our hair around.
We made it to Folsom, despite a little heat rash and teen angst. A Sacramento summer easily passes 100 degrees, a dry lizard heat, totally polarizing. You’re either the type that utters a small scream when you leave the barrier of air conditioning or you’re the lizard.
I’m a lizard. I was ripe with anticipation to re-emerge as a California girl, even if my new town’s most exciting contribution since the Gold Rush was Cash’s “Folsom Prison Blues.” I was now a west coast baby, summer lady. My L.E.I denim shorts and I were thrilled.
I never talked to my parents about this, but I assume we were tight on money. A move with two children to California feels like it would be expensive. We were also for the first time since I was in kindergarten, much further than 10 minutes from the ocean.
So, for entertainment and a brief reprieve, my parents took us to the River. The American River. Where I caught this very specific smell for the first time: a Steinbeck June sun warming the wild blackberries growing along the river bank, just hot enough to release their sweet smell without bursting the flesh.
In Folsom, we took the blackberries. My dad corralled my sister and I into child servitude and we’d fill plastic bags from Albertson’s that he’d turn into pie or jam.
This wasn’t our first rodeo with roadside fruit heists. Our family’s nomadic military timeline plus the exotic coupling my parent’s heritage offered up all sorts of indigenous berries to pilfer. Strawberry guavas while hiking in Aiea Heights, green translucent gooseberries in a northern German village. Bountiful blueberry trees my Dad and I would fastidiously de-fruit into large red buckets while my Mom and Sister, bored, made up dances in between the bushes.
I was an oddly serious and competitive berry picker, proud of my previous accomplishments, particularly in blueberry, and eager to further my reputation now that we were in California.
Maybe it was that picking felt important and chic to me, I loved pie, or because it was a such a formative summer going from girl to child woman on the West Coasts—but sun-warmed blackberry is my forever Eau de Summer.
Every time June rounds the corner into 90 degree days and my father is happiest on the river, we flock. Paddle boards, single and double kayaks, 4 dogs, Sierra Nevada IPAs, and whoever wants to come. Can you hear the train a’comin?
So much has changed since that first girlhood season: high school, divorce, car crashes, facial piercings, college, sister fights, Dad’s new girlfriend, our new boyfriends, bad break ups, Santa Barbara, no work, graduate school, plenty of work, new houses, San Francisco, Kundalini, marriages, Los Angeles, Burning Man, best sister friends, Ocean Beach, an ending, leaving home, and coming back again.
Generations turn over, my sister and I became women, and the world looks different today in this permeable moment. But the blackberries remain unchanged, and each year when they release their scent for me, I know exactly who I am.
Last week we went on a bike ride along the river. The blackberry bushes are flowering.
The scent of summer is coming. I believe I am ready.
Son in the City 