Fragrant

Five days and counting.

It smells like a perfume labeled “orchid,” circa 1957. I can’t really give you much more than that as a description. I’d say “old lady perfume” but then you’d be imagining a scent that has an “eau de la dusty dresser” tang to it, in the way perfumes age and go “off.” This is what that perfume smelled like when it was new in the bottle and Nancy Finklewelter’s husband bought it at Diercks & Walborn, the local department store, for their third anniversary.

Thankfully, the fragrance doesn’t fill the kitchen. You need to actually put your nose very close to the flower to smell it. It’s a good thing, too, because a fragrance type such as this that was very intense would likely be able to trigger migraines in people down the block from me. In a faint wafting level of scent, it’s quite lovely, though.

My other cattleya-family orchid is fragrant, too (the one that smells like a Hello Kitty scented eraser). That scent begins to change the day before the flower starts to fade, which gives you advance warning that it’s nearly done.

I’ll watch… or rather, sniff this one closely to see if does the same, because I’d like to try pressing the flower just before it begins to fade.

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“I am also full of ‘satiable curtiosities, Lady of the House, but I am better at avoiding the edges of the great grey-green, greasy Limpopo River, all set about with fever-trees, because am a little smarter than the Elephant’s Child. Did Kipling write about cats?” He sure did, dear Whitsun, in a story called, “The Cat Who Walked By Himself.” I’ll read it to you sometime.