Joni Mitchell, photo by Joel Bernstein, 1976

Months before the year’s loop tracks of Christmas songs began their relentless cheer, I kept hearing piano chords repeating the first few notes of Jingle Bells, that childhood song of forced merriment and a thousand soundtracks (its composer ran away to sea, presumably to get away from it). But this version never gets past the first bars of the chorus, repeating the way scratched LPs do when they get stuck in a groove, as if the pianist could not bear to play the whole thing. And then, a forlorn voice lets us know:

“It’s coming on Christmas
They’re cutting down trees
They’re putting up reindeer
And singing songs of joy and peace
Oh, I wish I had a river
I could skate away on”

Watercolour by Beverly Brown©

Written in 1971, the refrain of Joni Mitchell’s wintry song is a longing to put distance between self and pain, to glide away to a place where the present doesn’t hurt so much. Holed up in my apartment, looking every day at the alleyway outside my window, I longed restlessly for a somewhere else of endless, vast, uncrowded horizon. In my mind I began a solitary journey. But I was not alone.

Photo by Kim Hildebrand

I took with me DSH Perfumes Sweet Pine Tar. Releasing its fragrance was like being greeted by an old friend I had not realized how much I missed. Dabbed on my wrist and throat, it washes over me like ripples of cool breeze at forest’s edge. I close my eyes as Sweet Pine Tar’s balsamic notes warm on my skin and the winter aromas of pine meeting incense crisscrosses the air. The urban alleyway across from my window slowly dissolves, replaced by scents of fir tree and snow capping the boughs like whipped cream sleeves. The grey city leaves for now and the trees open their arms. Sweet Pine Tar brings me to woods, a warm hearth burning somewhere off in a yearned-for middle distance. I breathe the green turpenic fragrance of the conifers and hear the snap of frozen twigs. I remember campfire ash from a hundred cookouts, damp stones from where we spilled the water flask, and the chewy, resinous warm sweetness of the tree sap sticky on our fingers.

Waits River, Vermont, by Peter Huntoon

With Chatillon Lux Confluence I begin to smell the water. Confluence is inspired by the meeting of rivers in perfumer Shawn Maher’s native St. Louis, redolent with the bracing smell of conifers, juniper and citrus, and, even though rain drizzles tiredly outside, it feels as though it just became one of those brilliantly sunny, cold days when everything seems more alive. As cedar and pine mingle, I smell the tree line of the riverbank, the half-frozen streams of a dozen childhood rambles; the smell of submerged green leaves and frosted woodland that time we came across the water lily pads wreathing a half-frozen lake; later, the creak of sails hoisted, the tip and stagger of the deck as waves swelled beneath, the boat dodging small rafts of ice. All of this rushes back. Confluence guides me to a frozen river ahead with narrow banks that widen as it travels onwards.

I’m going to skate. In memory, I move hesitantly, steps choppy, my ankles buckling as they always did when I was a girl. But in impossibility dreams, where other people fly, I twirl and glissade like a ballerina on the ice. Confluence gives me Hans Brinker’s silver skates and I am gliding along solid water that glitters in the pale sun like a sheet of diamonds. I come to Confluence’s bend in the river where the waters fork, each offering its possibility. In the perfume’s mid-section, I catch a drift of the double notes of frankincense that build to a crescendo, and now there’s a church on a hillside from where I can just hear a hymnal melody. A smell of wet ground is here, too, from patchouli, and warm, mulchy tobacco that reminds me of my grandfather. Before me, a sky as big as the world itself opens.

Cedars at Sundown by Walter Launt Palmer, 1915

The day moves on. late afternoon. I am skating slower now. The darkening trees above the embankment confer but don’t give much away. Hans Hendley Bloodline for American Perfumer tells me stories of these conifers that wisely keep their counsel, of their friendship with the pines and the soil. Based on a special red cedar extract distilled by Hendley’s father from a red cedar tree grown on family land, Bloodline is intensely earthy, smoky. As the fragrance opens up, the air becomes thick with vanilla and woods. There’s a boozy, bourbon-cask tang that conjures a celebration nearby because it’s Christmastime and the bars are full. And I am skating slower now, the waft of smoke and fallen leaves all around me as Bloodline smudges the air with distant hearth fires, the dense scents of evergreen, moist earth. I know the snow will melt soon.

Bakery smells lure me, and Neil Morris Café pours me roasted, creamy coffee and pumpkin spice. I gaze at the towns beyond the river, the lights of their homes and glow topaz in the dusk, warm and safe as blankets. The piano chords return to Jingle Bells, somber and wistful, signaling River’s end. As the last chords echo, the perfumes, each on a separate part of my arms, dry down, and I return to the present. It’s quiet now.

Image by Alex Boudreau for iStock

These last months, when I could not travel, the outside world came to my door in little packages of perfume vials, like tidings of comfort and joy. For a few moments across many days, these fragrances have become my river, reminding me of the world beyond my city street. Spring is coming, and I smell it whenever I spray Perris Monte Carlo Mimosa Tanneron, with its fluffy, ethereal mimosa blossoms swaying like paper lanterns in the Cote D’Azur breeze. There are thousands of tales to be told, journeys to be made, and flowers to blossom, all asleep in bottles on my shelves. They wait and bloom, wait and bloom, even when we are not there.

Lauryn Beer, Senior Editor