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Now reading
Balms
Hemmed in by the prim deodorizing stare of the rare-book room, I stumbled over, lodged under glass, a revenant Essay on Color by Mary Gartside, a woman I'd never heard of, open to a hand-rendered watercolor illustration wet-bright as the day its unadulterated red- and-yellow was laid on (publication date 1818). Garden nasturtium hues, the text alongside explained, had been her guide. Sudden as on hands and knees I felt the smell of them suffuse the catacomb so much of us lives in- horned, pungent, velvet- eared succulence, a perfume without hokum, the intimate of trudging earthworms and everyone's last end's unnumbered, milling tenants. Most olfactory experience either rubs your nose in it or tries to flatter with a funeral home's approximation of such balms as a theology of wax alone can promise, and the bees deliver. Mary Gartside died, I couldn't even learn the year. Our one encounter occurred by chance where pure hue set loose unearthly gusts of odor from earthbound nasturtiums.