The Strange Journey of Alice Pendelbury

by Marc Levy

As I was falling asleep last night, I thought about my parents, and each memory was linked to a scent. I’m not talking about my father’s cologne or my mother’s perfume, but other things, like the smell of a leather satchel, of chalk dust and hot chocolate. It always smelled like cinnamon in our house when my mother was baking. She put it in nearly all of her desserts. And when I think back to the winters of my childhood when we went out to the countryside, I can smell the firewood my father collected in the forest and burned in our fireplace. In late spring there were the wild roses he gave to my mother, filling the sitting room with their fragrance. Mother always knew about my interest in and sensitivity to smells, but I never explained to her how odors mark every minute of my life and form a sort of language, a way of understanding the world. I smell the passage of time the way that others watch the changing colors of a sunset, distinguishing dozens of notes—rain dripping off leaves and filtering through moss, grass drying in the summer sun, the straw in the barns where we used to play hide-and-seek, the manure pile you pushed me into that time, or the branch of lilac blossoms you gave me on my sixteenth birthday. The memories of our teenage years and our adult lives recall other odors. Did you know that your hands have a peppery scent, for example, something between brass, soap, and tobacco?