The gardenia’s perfume remains as magical as ever.
By Tom Poland, A Southern Writer
TomPoland.net
Squall lines, thunder and lighting, and tornadoes signify the changing of the guard. Winter’s heavy air gives way to lighter air, and soon air conditioning will cool the masses. The night air will be locked away. It wasn’t always that way. Not for me. I remember a simple window fan. I loved it.
My boyhood bedroom would have fit in Otis the drunk’s jail cell twice. In it was a single bed, a pine chest of drawers, an old, silvered mirror, a half closet for hanging shirts, and a window with a fan in it, but no ordinary window. Summer nights, that old fan turned my widow into a portal to other worlds.
The fragrances must wait a bit for the sound that old fan made deserves praise. It soothed me to sleep many a night. I would lie in bed and imagine I was deep in the sea on a submarine . . . the rhythmic hum seemed what a submarine would sound like. Sometimes I imagined a bomber was flying me on a war mission. In my time a lot of WWII and Korean films played on our grainy black and white TV. Night fantasies swept me away to Slumberland.
My bedroom occupied a strategic position. Just outside it grew my mother’s gardenia. Come May the heady scent of those ivory blossoms proved intoxicating. A cool breeze funneled their scent into my room and I found myself sleeping in a lush botanical garden.
My mother referred to her gardenias as Cape Jasmines. I know that gardenias and Jasmines are easily confused and in this instance I believe my mother’s yard grew a gardenia. It was bushy …. Jasmines take the form of a vine. It matters little now for what I recall is what matters. Many a night the fans’ cool wind perfumed my sleep. Pleasant fragrances and imaginative nights … I haven’t slept as well since.
These nights a sound machine brings the surf or a rainstorm, a brook or a summer night, or simple white noise to shut out urban clamor. It does not come with the perfume of gardenias. It does not lull as that old heroic window fan did.
We weren’t rich but it mattered not. Being poor gave me a lullaby of wind and fragrant nights. When the gardenia was done blooming other flowering plants took their place. I cannot recall their names but I see riots of color and blooms of differing sizes and inhale fragrances aplenty.
My folks eventually had an AC system installed. No window units, but the central air behemoth that made people leap with joy. Liberated from the heat they were. Not me. My nights of perfumed sleep were no more.
I don’t know what Dad did with that old fan. I suspect he put it in his shop of tin where it gathered dust and rust. Dad was a mechanic and welder. He made things from other stuff. Maybe the old fan’s motor found new life in the electric pea sheller he fashioned from an old washing machine’s rollers. I remember the sheller smashed as many peas as it shelled. It didn’t last long.
Old ways mean more to me than ever. You, too, maybe. This new whiz-bang era leaves a lot to be desired. Something as simple and joyful, for instance, as a summer night punctuated by fireflies, the song of night frogs, cicadas, and the lilting whippoorwill’s call and the steady hum of a window fan.
Before I die I will find a place with a small bedroom and a window fan. Just outside the window will be a gardenia with its glossy green leaves, ivory blossoms, and the perfume of boyhood nights. It will be like being born again.