Bonfires are being prepared on the sandy beach lining the Vorskla, a river that cuts Poltava in half and hugs our hamlet within the city’s suburbs. One group of girls is busy weaving wreaths from wild flowers. Heaps of daisies, yarrow and cornflowers are spread out on the ground around them. Further along the bank, grills are being set up, and people are staking out spots with towels and empty crates. It is still early enough, several hours before the sun takes a dip in the river. The scent of hot sand, hay, wild thyme, cigarette smoke and water lilies hangs heavy in the still air. We are waiting for Ivan Kupala’s Eve.

Ivan Kupala is the Slavic version of the midsummer festival marking the summer solstice. According to the old style Julian calendar used by the Orthodox Church, it’s celebrated on the night of 6/7 July in Ukraine. (In neighboring Poland, Noc Kupały, just like the Swedish midsummer celebrations, takes place on 23/24 June.) Ivan means John (as in John the Baptist) and Kupala comes from the Slavic word for bathing. Although Christian traditions are woven into the festival, the roots are clearly pagan. Water and fire intertwine in various rites, and the river is worshiped as much as the saint himself. Today, the celebrations may involve more beer and barbecue than romantic rituals, but women still float wreaths in the streams to divine their future. Candles are still lit on the river bank. Couples still jump over the bonfire to test the strength of their relationship.

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This week is a holiday for my American readers as they celebrate the 4th of July, and for me, it’s a week of family activities in Ukraine with my grandmother and my mom–going for walks together, watching movies, talking, and of course, cooking. You might remember the cherry blossoms during my May visit, and now, all trees are covered with jewel-like fruit. I’ve already set my sights on a tree near the hammock for harvesting this week. There will be brioche buns with cherries, cherry strudel, cherry compote, and chicken in cherry sauce. And of course, my grandmother’s “royal cherry jam”. I will smell of cherry juice and my fingers will be permanently stained purple from pitting pounds of dark fruit.

While I’m pitting cherries and collecting scent impressions around Poltava, my grandmother’s hometown, our Scent Diary is here (Bois de Jasmin’s reviews and articles will be back on Monday.) It’s a place where we can share fragrances we encounter, good and bad, perfumes we wear and the scents around us. It’s a way to sharpen our sense of smell, but also just to enjoy the fragrance hobby in a different way.

Whether you write down 1 recollection or 10 matters less than simply reminding yourself to smell. You can add as many comments as you wish. You can comment today or over the course of the week; this thread will always be open. Of course, do share what perfume you’re wearing or what particularly good scented products you’ve discovered.

Photography by Bois de Jasmin

You already met Annette when she hosted a generous perfume giveaway for us to mark her 60th birthday. She’s a writer and a fragrance lover, and at one point she sent me the photos of her grandmother’s perfumes. In the course of our exchange, she shared her family story, which was too fascinating to be left in an email thread. So, I invited her to tell the story on these pages. When people ask me “why perfume?” I want them to read stories like this. Because scent, like few other things, can conjure up the past and make us dream.

I’m too sentimental for my own good. At least, that’s what some people think. But don’t we have to have some sentiment in our lives, if only to keep a memory intact?

My grandmother was born in Moscow, Russia in 1900. Sometime after the Revolution of 1917 her family went to their little summer home in Odessa, Ukraine, where they could grow food to help them survive. There she later met and married my grandfather, a businessman who’d come to the U.S.S.R. from Greece by way of Asia Minor. My mother was born in Odessa in 1925 and sometime in the late 1920s she left the U.S.S.R. for good. And there the Russian part of the story ends for me.

Leaving Russia with very few of her own things, my grandmother made a new life for herself in Greece.  She had to learn a new language, and a new way of doing things, in a very different climate, but her love of my grandfather and her stubborn tenacity saw her through.

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If you love Shalimar Parfum Initial as much as I do, consider stocking up, because Guerlain is discontinuing this gourmand perfume with an iris twist (along with its flanker, Parfum Initial L’Eau). There will be a new Shalimar interpretation called Shalimar Souffle de Parfum. It’s described as tender, warm, and enveloping, featuring notes of bergamot, lemon, mandarin, jasmine sambac, orange blossom water absolute, vanilla from India and Tahiti, and white musk.

“To emphasize and give to the orange blossom its honeyed notes, Thierry Wasser used orange blossom water absolute. This absolute is the result of a very specific process. First step, distillation, to obtain the orange blossom water, then, extraction, to collect the precious absolute. This powerful absolute accentuates the floral trail of the fragrance.”

It will be available next month at Guerlain boutiques and counters. Via Guerlain.com (thank you to Jaime K for the news)

Elisa on summer favorites

Here in the US, we tend to fight the heat with cold – in the South, that means the AC is always blasting and there’s as much ice in your glass as there is tea. When I lived in Houston, I’d routinely leave a restaurant with goose bumps all over my body, and for a moment, the 100-degree heat outside would feel delicious.

Elsewhere, though – in India, along the equator – people often fight fire with fire, drinking hot tea and eating foods so spicy your scalp prickles with sweat, thus tripping the body’s internal cooling mechanisms.

I prefer the American method when it comes to food and beverage (I’ll be drinking iced coffee until the first snow). But when it comes to perfume, both strategies appeal. Some days I reach for crisp, refreshing colognes, but other days, I crave notes like musk, incense, and narcotic flowers that bloom and billow in the heat.

Cold Perfumes for Summer

Diptyque Philosykos

Wearing Philosykos, the quintessential fig fragrance, you naturally get all the suggestions of lying under a shade tree – green leaves, sweet wood, milky sap. But there’s something in the fig materials that also reminds me of air conditioning chemicals, so a spray of this on a hot day is like a subliminal stroll past the vents of a swamp cooler.

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