Pieces of My Heart
I love thinking about the different places where I’ve left pieces of my heart.
I definitely left a piece of my heart along the Mackenzie River in Oregon. If you start in Eugene and you drive east(ish) along the Mackenzie for about an hour, you’ll come to a trail which leads to the blue pool. The pool itself is dazzling; the blue is unearthly. But the real majesty is the the path to get to the blue pool..
Every step along the path releases the perfume of the forest — it comes from underfoot, the sweet, warm, slightly balsamic fragrance of dried pine needles, the woody, vegetal smell of massive tree trunks, the smoky campfire and mushroom smell of treemoss and lichen. It comes from up above, a bright, slightly citrus-y green smell of verdant pine branches mingled with the deep rich loamy smell of the deep forest. This is the perfume of the heart of the world. I knew it instantly, the first time I walked in the Oregon old-growth forests — it’s a fragrance that nourishes me and sustains me. I don’t know whether my visceral reaction to the fragrance of the old-growth forests is universal or whether it’s peculiar to me. Does this happen to you, too? I feel blessed to have been gifted with this sense.
Another piece of my heart lives an hour north of Boston, at Redledge, the old house where my mother in law grew up. Redledge is surrounded by trees; think of tall trees and then think of taller trees and then think of the tallest trees. These are the trees around Redledge. And when the wind blows they whisper and sigh and rustle, and when the storms come they creak and whoosh and the branches whip wildly and the leaves never stop. They radiate the rich, distinct fragrance of warm wood and damp wood and green wood and dry wood. Glades and meadows open to the tidal salt marsh behind the house and in the evening I sit in a comfortable chair looking out. As the sun drops lower, I smell the smells of the forest — damp earth and resinous wood, and the mossy mushroom fragrance of the forest floor, warm, musty and loamy. In the morning, I cover my feet in Deep Woods Off and the sharp medicinal synthetic citrus smell mixes with the verdant green fragrance of freshly cut grass, herbal and aromatic, full of leaves and warmed earth. We walk up the road to the white gate, crossing the bridge at Gould’s Creek and following the road across the salt marsh. The air here is full of sulfurous brine and mud, brackish reeds, earthy and stagnant and pleasingly marine. Some people say it’s stinky. I think it’s intoxicating.
The Drôme Provençale claims yet another piece of my heart. Mom and Dad bought the house in Nyons because Mom had always dreamed of owning a house in France. She filled it with baskets of dried lavender and even now I refill the baskets from one year to the next, so that every time we arrive and open the house up, we release the fragrance of lavender, aromatic and floral and earthy; the smell of dried sweetgrass, dried flowers, dried herbs, floats through the house and reminds me, viscerally, of her. Nyons smells of the outdoors and of sunwarmed stone. The surrounding hills are full of olive groves and tall grasses; the roadsides are bordered with wild thyme and as we walk through the hills the pungent aromatic fragrance is a constant accompaniment. Thursday is market day. It’s been that way for centuries. The vendors start at 5 AM, setting up their stalls below our balcony. The smells are myriad — sometimes you can catch a breath of ripe nectarine or peach, rich and syrupy, and sometimes you can make out the sweet waxy malty scent of honey. The bees get their pollen from the lavender fields; everything is connected.
My heart does not feel smaller for having left pieces of it in these various places. I’ll say it’s the opposite. My heart feels manifold thanks to this dispersal of fundamental bits. I love living with a multitude of fragrant souvenirs. Thank you, heart.
