The Scent Garden · 20 Rooms & 6 Meditations

Before you see a garden, you smell it. Before you remember somebody's face, you may remember their perfume. A house can stay in your memory because of the soap in its bathroom. A country can come back through orange blossom. A person can return through the smell of their coat. You spend every waking minute inside an enormous amount of information that you were never given any training in, no vocabulary for, and that almost nobody ever mentions. Twenty rooms in four wings, about the one sense nobody was ever taught to use. You do not pick a room, you pick a wing, and take whichever of its rooms suits the evening. Learning to Smell is the training, including why what you dislike is as useful as what you love. What Plants Are Doing is the botany, and it is the part that surprises people most: one tree that makes three perfumes, flowers that keep a clock, and the fact that none of it was ever for us. People and Places is the emotional wing, where a smell is a person, and where your own house is the one perfume you cannot smell. Composing is where you start building rather than only noticing. There is a room for anybody who has lost her sense of smell, which is a great many more women than it used to be, and it is not an afterthought. It costs almost nothing, it trains a sense measurably, and it ends in an archive you keep for years. One entry a month, and in twenty years it is the most specific record of a life that anybody in your family has.