No sample today. I've been wearing several things, trying to decide what to talk about next: The Different Company Bergamote, Comptoir Sud Pacfique Vanille Amande, Victor & Rolf Flowerbomb. I also snuck in a day with La Chasse, from my sample vial. Which one will I choose to write about next? You shall have to tune in and see.
What else? Should we talk about my new obsession with Annick Goutal? It started first with a post on Monkey Posh about the latest release, Neroli. Neroli is one of my favorite notes. She also mentions Le Chevrefeuille. They both sounded lovely, and I trust Ms. Parisjasmal's taste, so I went trolling for lists of notes on other scents as well. How did I miss all these pretty fragrances?
And then I clicked over to Perfume Smellin' Things, where Colombina is giving us a full week of lily of the valley reviews. Lily of the valley is my other new obsession! And what did Colombina offer me? A review of an Annick Goutal lily of the valley fragrance, Le Muguet! Yes! But it's a limited edition! I clicked straight through to overstockperfume.com, only to find they no longer have it. To comfort myself, I ordered a mess of Annick Goutal samples. One has lily of the valley in there somewhere as a note. But it won't be the same. I suppose I could try the Caron, since I don't have the heliotrope issue that plagues Colombina, but not yet. I'm going to pout a little longer about not getting what I want.
I think maybe I've used more exclamation points in this post than I've ever used in my life, total.
And finally, I love May. May is now one of my favorite months. By mid-month a lot of the glorious spring flowers--the dogwoods, the azaleas, the Japanese magnolias, the Bradford pears--are gone, and so it can feel like the end of spring in a way. When I lived in Texas I hated May, because it was as though nature simply turned up all the dials in the sauna, the only relief being those tornado-alley thunderstorms that make you want to get in the bathtub with the weatherband radio and a pillow to cover your head. But in Atlanta, May still has some cooler days. The trees are bouquets of fresh and varied greens. The leaves are still so full of youth and vigor, they appear so perfect as to be made of wax. My husband keeps predicting the hottest summer ever for us here, but I'm not listening. I'm in the moment with blue skies and some days in the 70s.
And so I leave you with this:
The Trees
The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.
Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too.
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.
Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.
-Philip Larkin
*poem from Collected Poems, Ed. Anthony Thwaite
