Scent of a woman

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"Women! What can you say? Who made 'em? God must have been a fuckin' genius. The hair... They say the hair is everything, you know. Have you ever buried your nose in a mountain of curls... just wanted to go to sleep forever? Or lips... and when they touched, yours were like... that first swallow of wine... after you just crossed the desert. Tits. Hoo-ah! Big ones, little ones, nipples staring right out at ya, like secret searchlights. Mmm. Legs. I don't care if they're Greek columns... or secondhand Steinways. What's between 'em... passport to heaven."  Lt Col. Frank Slade  (from the movie Scent of a Woman)

Writers should write about what they know, imbuing language with passion and titillating the imaginations of our readers. I've been away for a long time and I have fought to find my focus...but now Slacker's back.


For a man who has spent an inordinate amount of time writing about women, I'm seldom right about them, which gives me more fodder than is my write; so today I thought I'd begin to try to make sense by writing about scents.


Slacker likes girlie girls, not necessarily the high maintenance honeys of his youth, but a woman whose femininity is obvious and innate.


The first woman outside of my family that I admitted love to was a dancer; she moved effortlessly, smiled beautifully, kissed tenderly and smelt the way morning smells...clean but not sanitised, fresh not odorous...raw and natural. To this heady mix came Anais Anais, and as I made myself familiar with her delta of venus, her scent came to represent true femininity to me...I would smell her in my dreams.


There have been others since, all with unique combinations of the natural and the cosmetic that lead to smiles and fond reminisces of place and time, scent and sound. 


The Caribbean is a sensual place, rich with a feminine vitality, charged with natural perfumes and ready to seduce. The haunting, delicate Lady of the Night which scents so many island place and spaces always reminds me of the charged atmosphere of the first hungry contact with Tallest, the hint of her menthol cigarettes and the rum and coke on her breath adding current to the steamy Woodbrook night as our relationship stepped from the platonic into the unknown.
   

Illicit mornings spent with D in the apartment borrowed from Starboy Toolum overlooking St George’s are brought to my consciousness with the unique combination of cocoa butter and coconut oil. She, of cocoa butter smoothed skin and soft curly natural hair sheened with coconut oil glowing in the eastern sun reflected off the Careenage, the missing ingredient, brought to life by this olfactory trigger and I smile.


Remembering K, her cinnamon loins inviting, glowing in the soft orange room on the hill, I smell the musk of marijuana and the acridness of chlorine from the pool where what had just ended had begun. Wrong on any number of levels, this combination is a heady memory of mussed sheets and office foreplay often verging on the real thing.


I’m as much Lt. Col Frank Slade as any man may be willing to admit, but there are those scents that give a sense of separation; triggering feelings of longing thought long gone…bringing even the most resolute to their knees.
  
The cold sterility of recycled, dry aircraft air that offers hints of promise in the journey ahead; acts to trigger a longing to know what would have been between BJ and I had things been different.


She, the professional traveller with feet firmly planted on the ground and I, the island bound dreamer. 


Oft connecting but never journeying on together – our travels limited to snatched intimate moments spread over time like the islands which once separated us. She would smell of where she had been last, aviation fuel mingling with the scents of interisland travel and travellers. As the layers dropped away, more of who she was would become apparent, filling my nostrils with Caribbean woman…a hint of citrus, vetiver, rich black earth, salt, sweet, seductive, comforting…even a little raunchy. If I ever had a home again, she is what it would smell like…my own heaven on earth.