Sweet September
Saturday, September 21, 2013 at 06:31AM I can’t bear to let September go by without a visit to our little patch of paradise at Anglesea, because it’s freesia season. Here I am again, sitting on the verandah, revelling in the scents of spring. I wrote about this last in 2008, a piece called Sweet September, and it ended up as the very last piece in my second book. Here it is:
Sweet September
Sitting on the verandah of my family’s beach shack late September, white ti-tree petals waft like confetti. Footy’s over for the year, the spring racing carnival has just been launched, cricket has yet to start for the summer. In Melbourne, we measure the seasons by sport.
Me, I stick with the ti-tree. I’d rather know the time of year by blooms and blossoms, the colours of the flowers and the scents they dispense so generously.
Our beach shack sits on a chaotic acre and a half of bush. Wild old marvellous crazy gums wind and contort; their branches twisted in weird angles or lying horizontal, parallel to the ground. Come down here late July – officially mid winter – and the wattle is set to take off – all Aussie gold and green and the heavy sweet smell of cake.
By late August the wattle is past its best. Come September and the official start to spring, all that is left of our proud national symbol is moth-eaten balls of dirty yellow that come off on me every time I brush past, so that my little nephew bursts out laughing when I appear at the door and says, ‘why are you wearing wattle all over you?’
September is my favourite blossom time at the beach. Get out of the car after the drive down from the city and it hits you in a wave of sweetness: freesias. The bush block is carpeted with the things: pure white, creamy yellow and pale mauve. They are everywhere. When I go back to Melbourne I take bunches with me to fill our city home with the smell of the bush and the beach. When my sister leaves, she takes a bunch in a jar to leave on our mother’s grave.
Jonquils take me back to another bush-beach place where we lived when the kids were tiny. We’d drive out of the country town on a day off and go picnicking where there was an old stone church, still used on the odd occasion, and a crumbling tennis court to go with it – vines devouring its sagging fences and the roots of trees buckling its floor.
Early spring in this magic place was jonquil time – mini daffodils of bright yellow and white. We’d gather armfuls to take back home and look around and not notice the difference, so many were left.
But jasmine is pure Melbourne. September in Melbourne means jasmine – climbing all over suburban fences in undisciplined riot. First the tightly furled, deep burgundy of the unopened buds and then opening out to white and pink. And the scent!
Every spring I pick jasmine to bring the scent into the house. But it resists me. Jasmine is only good in the wild, the urban wild of gardens and fences, pergolas and walls. When cut and put in a vase it flops around anyhow, looks odd, wilts in a day.
But I need to smell it. First of all, it takes me back to exams. As long as I can remember, I had exams looming around the time that jasmine is flooding the city air with sweetness. Just when a young girl gets restless with thoughts of spring and warmth, new life and romance, she has to have her nose in her books.
Secondly, an infinitely sweeter and more poignant memory – of young love. Back then I lived in Toorak where my dad was minister at a church. I was never happy there. Coming from India and then a small weatherboard house on a tiny block the other side of town, the high walls and exclusive shops of Toorak make me miserable.
When we moved there, I was 14 and seriously in love for the first time. I had lived a couple of miles from the object of my affections – to move to Toorak felt like the end of the world.
Still, love will find a way, even teenage love, especially teenage love, and he caught the tram over to see me every weekend. We would wander those empty Toorak streets, ostensibly walking the dog but really just desperate to be alone.
Or else sneak off without even the dog as chaperone. Walk until we found a friendly wall covered in abundant clouds of jasmine to hide behind in the unlikely event of anyone ever walking along that cul de sac. Press up against the white brick wall and against each other; kissing and barely coming up for air, drowning in innocence and desire and the scent of jasmine.
The jasmine is all but over in Melbourne now and with it the vividness of memories that can only be evoked by the sense of smell. That boyfriend, to whom I’ve been married for nearly three decades, sits beside me on the verandah at the beach, bald and much loved, reading the paper, his glasses on his nose, cup of tea steaming gently in his hand. And the sea breeze surrounds us with the perfume of freesias and wafts white petals of ti-tree confetti around our heads.
Reader Comments (3)
Nice! I always enjoy your blog.
Very evocative Clare. Permit me to share my own reflection on a similar experience
THE INFINITE RETRIEVABILITY OF THE SENSES
In the cosmetics section of Myer,
attractive young women wave scented cards in the air.
I walk into a whiff of perfume
I have not encountered for forty-five years...
A girl named Delma wore that scent
when we borrowed her brother’s VW
and went to a drive-in movie.
Delma is somewhere in Brisbane now;
Her brother is gone, I am sure the VW is gone
and I am damned near gone as well.
But after forty-five years, that scent
took me right back to the grey VW
and Delma and all the rest of it
which was considerable.
So the sight of a certain shade of red,
the sound of someone whistling,
the taste of mango, a line of poetry
one has not heard since primary school
can retrieve what once seemed lost forever.
There is probably a scientific explanation
but to me
it seems embedded in the senses,
in our chemistry, in the cerebrum.
It makes computers look simple.
Wattle and blossom and freesias and bluebells - it's a wonderful and fragrant spring, and you've captured it so well, and then added the lovely twist in the tail/tale about your "boyfriend". Thanks, Clare!