Sense Memory: After the Heat

ANOTHER LIFE AGO, it seems, I had to leave L.A. -- flee L.A. would be more precise. The big, sprawling city became claustrophobic -- or at least that was how I saw it at the time. I was finishing my degree, interning for a magazine, selling books at a Century City bookstore now long vanished. It was the latter that was getting to me. Not the routine of the bookseller job; that was pleasant -- shelving books and talking with other clerks about ideas. But the people who came through the doors with pressing needs -- that was wearing. Because the store was adjacent to so many talent agencies, entertainment management glass-and-steel high-rises and a major motion picture studio, there were days that the very air seemed to be sucked out of the entire store -- the entire open-air mall itself -- with demands and temper tantrums and never a thank you. It was a "new breed" of Hollywood and it had big hair, big shoulders and super-size egos.

I'd had enough. I concluded, "L.A. was different. Had changed." I packed up and headed north to San Francisco to try on life there. I enrolled in school and for the first time as an adult didn't have a car. It wasn't as dislocating as I thought, rather it was liberating. I wandered all over that beautiful jewel of a city, across its fabled seven hills. Most weekends, I'd just pick a direction and walk, just to see what I might find. I lived on the southwest end of San Francisco, in the Sunset where I often saw the sun for a mere three hours a day. At 3PM, the fog would float in and hunker down a top the city like a big down comforter. The air smelled damp, metallic and brackish.

I missed the sun. Not the intense heat of late summer, but the hint of real warmth and the gold tones and shadows that late-afternoon sunlight brought with it. But too there was something else missing.

My first visit back to L.A. was in the Spring. A mini-heatwave was upon us. I stood in a friend's backyard for a party; her backyard, a loud, brilliant tangle of bougainvillea and sneaky morning glory. But what hit harder than the fuchsia and magenta petals curling up the trellis or my friends' faces and their stories told in their familiar cadences was something on the air. Literally. The breeze carried a subtle perfume, sweet but not too, floral but cut with sharp spice. Also, there was a hint of smoke. A bitterness. It hung in the air, only disturbed by a breeze. It took me a bit to realize that it wasn't something someone had dabbed behind his or her ear or something cooking on the grill, or something burning, L.A.-style off in the not-too-far-off distance.
It was chaparral, ground-cover -- sage, rosemary. It was a explosion of night-blooming jasmine overflowing a nearby flower-bed. With the cool night coming on the air was full of scent notes, a mix so unique to Los Angeles. Nothing brought the city back to me, my connection to it, as much as this. I was home: the fading light, the cooling breeze after the heat -- and those aromas. L.A.'s scent rubbing against all of us. Claiming us. Lingering.

-- L.G.
(photo credit: flickr creative commons)