A spice order arrived from World Spice yesterday and as I unpacked the box and then filled jars and grinders, the entire kitchen was filled with the aroma of spices. I felt like I was in some exotic spice market and the experience followed me throughout the day, the aroma of spice a part of my skin. Appropriate then that I was reading Elif Shafak's 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in this Strange World, where memories often begin with recollections of evocative scents or tastes. Shafak's prose often captures an almost poetically sensory sense of place and time that can feel palpable to the reader.
I really only filled the tall salt grinder, the matching pepper grinder had already been filled as Tellicherry peppercorns were one of the very few spices I replaced before moving. In fact, I should have ordered spices earlier, and it was only as I was setting the table for a dinner party that I realized I did not have salt for the table. I managed to put out small cellars with Maldon flakes but although I am happy with fingers in bowls of salt, not everyone shares this predilection. But now the grinder is filled with chunks of Himalayan pink salt, oh I know, how trendy of me, and I concocted a blend of six peppers for the smaller funky-looking grinder.
I actually bought that grinder just so I could fill it with mixed peppers. I didn't need it but somehow its weird almost alien looks drew me in. I can't say it is beautiful and yet it is in an odd beautiful-ugly sort of way. I like that It is made of local seed pods. I actually like that its strangeness draws attention to itself. Perhaps I just like it because it is unexpected.
And while I am thinking about scent and sensory stimuli, I am reminded that the scent in the air changed a couple of weeks ago. It is still hot, too hot to plant in my yard, and I don't think the sprinkler system is fully in yet, or if it is, no one has told me how to use it. But the air now has a subtle scent of autumn about it, a whiff of dust and decay, most apparent in the hours around dusk and dawn. This morning also, my toes were cold. That is probably more about me than the actual weather. The house is the same temperature it has been, but somehow my body is sensing the shift, and whereas a cold floor was deliciously soothing in the summer, it is now becoming chill. I needed new slippers in the spring but delayed purchasing them until after the move. It is now time and so slipper-buying will be added to today's list.
I can't say that I am really settled yet. I still feel like I am in a somewhat transitional space although I admit that this may be primarily because the yard remains so unfinished. I don't expel it to feel finished anytime soon as I have deliberately decided to only put in certain areas or larger items now. I want the garden to evolve over time, and yet at the moment perhaps it remains a little too bare. Or perhaps it is all just in my head. I am unpacked but I feel like I am standing on an empty set.
Not a set like the set for Million Dollar Quartet, which I saw at the Clarence Brown Theater last week. It was a fabulous show and a fun evening. The actors were incredibly talented and good, but I felt the show worked better as an event, something like musical entertainment, than it worked as an actual play exploring that particular moment in the development of Sun Records. But that may just be me -- I always want something to think about, I always want discovery and meaning. It is likely that my brain looks for it, refuses to take the passive, easy, way out. I felt there could have been, perhaps should have been, more of a story to be told even thought the characters themselves, the relationships between them and the music was fabulous.
Perhaps it is just a symptom of my own pensive state of mind, but this exploration of the early days of rock reminds me of the cultural shift that had started over a decade previously, a shift sparked by the horrors of WWII and the changing of the American cultural landscape that it sparked. Rock wasn't really something radically new, but merely a specific symbol of a change already well under way, even though it may not have been visible as such at that particular time.
I wonder if we are in the midst of another shift....
