Down to Earth: Lilac Perfume
(Page 2 of 2)
April/May 1993
By Jim Long
During school that afternoon, as I was gazing out the window, it came to me: lilacs. Of course! If lilacs had even a fraction of the effect on Jeanie that they had on me, I could easily win her heart.
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I looked up “perfume” in the old encyclopedia and asked a fifth-grader to help me with the big words. And there I found my answer: boil flowers in distilled water, catch the steam in a cloth, and bottle it. There was more—about preservatives, oils, chemicals, and secret formulas—but I ignored it. I had the essence of how perfume could be made.
I worked on my project at home over the weekend. I had no distilled water (nor did I know what it was), but I thought that pure rainwater, cleansed by passing through the charcoal filters of our cistern, surely would be just as good. I got a small pan of cistern water, and with Mom’s permission, heated it on the burner of our new electric stove. As the water came to a rolling boil, I added the double handful of lilac blossoms I had picked, still on their stems but with the leaves removed.
With the heat lowered and Mom watching, I very carefully covered the pan with a clean white dish towel to soak up the pure perfume. Hours passed in my mind, but the cloth didn’t get wet enough to wring out. Mom finally grew impatient (as did I), and I removed the pan to the table. I was not about to give up my quest for the magic liquid, so I dipped the cloth into the fragrant water and wrung out enough to fill the tiny perfume bottle I had salvaged and washed. I was gratefully relieved that the bottled water smelled strongly of lilac.
I could already imagine Jeanie, dressed in exotic cloth, holding my hand and looking at me in awe. And the following Monday, in the Osage orange, I gave Jeanie my prize bottle. I didn’t even wait until our lunch boxes were open.
Unfortunately, it didn’t turn the tide in my direction. I suspect she never believed that I really made the perfume in that bottle. And perhaps she didn’t respond to the smell of lilacs the way I do.
Each spring when the lilacs bloom, I remember the neighbor’s goat that ate our lilac bush, our rainwater cistern, first grade, gabardine, and Jeanie. The fragrance was captured in my memory more permanently than in the bottle. And Jeanie, if you happen to be reading this—I really did make that perfume for you! v
Jim Long lives and dispenses the ingredients for a fragrant life at Long Creek Herb Farm in Oak Grove, Arkansas.
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