The scent of place

We arrived at the house, street green with trees and shrubs, but dry lawns desiccated brown.

Summer heat draws all moisture summons fragrance from living things.

The exposed soil has its scent the garden another, a special smell living, resilient beauty, tough and gentle. Each time a little different, always life giving in the contrast to dead bitumen streets. Mood affected by flowers in bloom. 

The smell of roses is sometimes strong, but lavender will overpower everything, brush past the rosemary or crush it under foot or car tyre and it leaps up and fills the senses.

On this morning before the dry sting of rarified aircraft ventilation had worn off, the garden did smell faintly of marzipan. I don't know why or how. 

Another dry, hot year, not many flowers blooming. 

Definitely marzipan.  Subtle... marzipan. Just slightly but enough to know. A sweet welcome. 

Home.

And in the paddocks a peppery mixture of dry dust and golden wild grain, the smell of grass and sedge. I have no idea what the grass is that produces that scent, I can show you the stem, the flower and seed, but I don't know the name of it.

We name, names mean something, but the sense of smell tells all. 

That grass rustles when the wind blows or when you walk through it. It smells stronger in the heat.

The eucalyptus has a smell too, it is strong and winds through valleys on updrafts and breezes, it moves with the change of air pressure. And the morning dew produces a trace of something else, sweet and heavy in the green grassy valleys of foothills between the city and the dividing range. 

Before the fires consumed our forests, the dark moist earth of tree fern gullies had its scent too. If the intimate beauty of that place ever returns I'll remember the scent in an instant! But that will take a long time. A lifetime, maybe longer. 

I couldn't wait to leave Darwin, the tropical air with its own pungent smells of dead rats, cockroach shit and mold. Every year when the rains come so many rats are flushed out of their homes to die on the road behind the bins and in gardens. So many dead things... 

Houses stink of food scraps rotting in the bin, but not our place, when I return from a trip I smell, frangipani, Moria or sometimes the happy plant. A home must smell good. A brief respite from the onslaught of death and rot. 

On my first day back at work I cycle past the vacant block where the overpowering smell of human shit, reminds me that 100s are sleeping rough, mostly unnoticed by office workers who only pass from air conditioned, house to car to office and back again. But I smell it.

I smell everything and so little of it smells sweet.