Of Cats & Lilacs

[akirlu]

Yesterday was a big day for Spike. In the morning, in the usual pre-tuna truce, she managed to get fully nose-to-nose with Tinka and hold for several beats before freaking out and hissing and squalling. Then all was chaos, of course, but before that, there was a full heart-beat, maybe two, when they were a whisker apart and simply regarding each

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[athenais]

Lilacs seem to exert a powerful influence over those who grew up with them. I can't think of what scents really spike my own memories and nostalgia the way a lilac gets to a person who associates them with childhood. Maybe the scent of rain on cedar bark.

My favorite scent is gardenia, though not in perfume. I wish we could grow them up here on the windy end of the peninsula.

[akirlu]

Interestingly, although I do like the scent very much, and lilacs in the neighborhood are a thing I do associate with Sweden, and therefore childhood, the scent of lilac isn't particularly one of my childhood nostalgia triggers. Childhood, for me, smells of my grandmother's rose hedge (rosa rugosa), stearin wax candles, lily of the valley, red clover and buttercup in wet meadow grass, smultron, newly baked bullar, hard rectangular crayons on salvaged brown paper, and mildew in my great-grandfather's shed. Oh, and a hundred and twelve other things, besides. What childhood smells like -- that's either a post in itself, or possibly a story prompt.