Some letters you remember by their words. Others by their handwriting. And a few, years later, by their smell: a trace of perfume, lavender, old paper, the scent of someone's home.
Smell is the sense most closely tied to memory. A single breath of a familiar scent can bring back a person or a place more vividly than any photograph. That's why a scented letter can be such a tender gift.
A very old habit
People have perfumed their letters for centuries. Writing paper was stored in drawers with sachets of dried flowers or herbs. Lovers touched a drop of perfume to the corner of the page. In the nineteenth century, scented stationery became fashionable, and many ladies' writing boxes had a small compartment for perfume or pressed flowers.
Gentle ways to scent a letter today
1. Store your paper with something fragrant. Keep your stationery in a box with a sachet of dried lavender, a few cloves or a bar of good soap for a week or two. The scent will be soft and natural. 2. Perfume the air, not the paper. Spray your perfume once into the air and pass the sheet through the mist, rather than spraying directly. Direct sprays can stain or smudge the ink. 3. Tuck in a sprig. A dried lavender stem or a few rosemary leaves inside the fold. Keep it flat and light so it travels well. 4. Write by candlelight, with a scented candle nearby. The paper will catch a faint trace of the room. 5. Use your own scent. If you have a perfume people associate with you, a whisper of it on the envelope will say your name before they open it.
A few precautions
Keep scents light: some people are sensitive to strong perfumes. Test on a scrap of the same paper first. And avoid anything oily, which can leave marks.
Notice the scent of what you receive
Next time a letter arrives, before reading it, bring it close and breathe in slowly. Paper, ink, a faint trace of somewhere else. It's a small meditation in itself.
A letter for all the senses
The First Letter is a short sensory meditation on receiving a letter: the weight of the envelope, the sound of the paper, and yes, its scent. Read it or listen to it, for free, with a sample of my magazine, "(meditating) On Art". A letter to remember with every sense.
Remember to take as much time as you need, and meet me at the next one.
Love, Evi