Every day this week, I have walked outside. This was a ritual for years, walking alone, walking with my sister, walking with B-man...negotiating the hills and staring at the mountains that have seen endless lifetimes and still remained the same.
Lately, though, I've become a treadmill girl, logging necessary workouts early in the morning before trudging into the office. But this week, I've come home early to walk in my neighborhood again. Water bottle in hand, I take off up the hill, breathing in the scents of leaves, fresh dirt, geranium and...hyacinth. Stopping to smell them is never the same as passing their scent in the breeze. Hyacinths were meant to sway back and forth, filling the air with their sillage.
At the end of every walk, I return home and shop my perfume cabinet to find something that best matches the smells of the outdoors. I know I've found the right one when it is such a perfect replica that I can hardly detect its scent when holding it up to my nose. Yesterday, as soon as I got home, I started searching for a perfume that carried the hyacinth magic. One after the other, I opened the box, sniffed the nozzle and replaced it on the shelf. Then, like the thought of a familiar face, I remembered a perfume that was tucked away in the sock drawer B-man recently donated to hardly-worn-but-still-admired perfumes: Josephine by Rance.
Josephine is not a perfume I reach for, and honestly, I bought it for the name alone. But yesterday, its sweet, tweedy hyacinth extended the pleasure of my walk and helped me remember what I'd been missing. Josephine presents hyacinth combined with orris, which emphasizes the old fashioned powder of the dry down and then gently fades away in a cloud of dusty vanilla.
Josephine by Rance: I bought it for the name, never suspecting that spring lived inside.
picture from www.woodfordes.perfumery.co.uk
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