A friend of mine showed me a blossom from a plant that blooms here in early June that "smells like the last week of school" and I breathed it in. I said it smelled like Easter to me. We sniffed again and decided the blossom smelled like white chocolate and mostly marshmallow, sort of, a blend. (Things that smell better than they taste, we thought.)
"It still smells like sweet freedom!" she said, "but Easter certainly makes sense too." To her Easter's biggest scent was the Lily.
"The potted lilies that my father brought home for my mother," she said "seemed to soak the house in this sudden spring, even if there was still snow on the ground outside, the hothouse lilies created this impression of June weather."
My friend loves the month of June, can you tell? She is a summer girl, born in late September, funny enough. She loves summer clothes and sunshine, grew up on Long Island, reading books on the beach and on a sailboat. To her summertime is sweet freedom.
Penhaligon's Lily & Spice is the finest scent evoking the Easter Lily. It is really amazing in this respect and the body creme is fabulous too. (but only if you want to savor this scent.) Its one I like to smell more than wear, but I do wear it around the house on grey winter days, to evoke spring.Of all the Penhaligon scents, Lily & Spice is the strongest and most modern.
It was forbidden to display an Easter Lily or a poster of an Easter Lily in your home if you were a Catholic living in Northern Ireland. If you had a potted lily, you'd better keep it hidden in a back room. I don't know when this rule was lifted, but I do remember visiting there when the rule was enforced. Any thought of the Easter Rebellion was not allowed. The scent of freedom, yet again.
For me, summer has always been mountains, either the Alleghenies or the Catskills.
Photo: A meadow in the Catskills with a chair for Merle Sneed to relax in.
