Well, I don’t know if the chickens appreciate the beautiful, fragrant bower of dog roses cascading over their pen, but I certainly do. It greets me each morning as I’m walking across the lawn and I just stop and think of all the happy hours that scent recalls for me…one of the sweetest is Delphine’s 24th birthday party, now so long ago it seems (how could it be seven years ago?), with girls in light Regency dresses flitting across the lawn and young men recalled from ungentlemanly tactics in croquet only by Mama’s dinner call from the front door…I wore the little wild roses in my hair that night, stopping to gather them on ‘Lover’s Lane’ on my way home from work, all in a dither because I knew that Philip was going to be there…
Tasha Tudor avows that scent is the most potent arouser of memory, and I agree. Nothing holds the key to my own beloved associations like the mystic memento of scent.