still-sound 46. Air

I had the day off from work today so I took an extra long walk with Rosie in the morning.  The air seemed especially clear.  So much so that everything looked brighter, every color more saturated and vivid.  It reminded me of when I was a kid and skipped school for whatever reason.  Everything, including the light looked different.  Brighter.  I suppose the midday light was brighter compared to the dusky glow that lit my return home from school in the afternoon.  I never noticed the brightness on the weekends though, only days when I was supposed to be in school.

When I returned home from my walk with Rosie I lit a stick of Hyofu incense by Yamada Matsu and meditated.  Rebecca, a doctor I know from San Francisco bought this incense for her husband since he likes ethereal scents.  I was intrigued.  I found very little online about this incense.  What few descriptions I did manage to scramble up mentioned its delicacy and nuance.  After several burnings of Hyofu I've decided to describe it as the scent of air.  Maybe the air around a small body of water.  A stream or a pond, certainly not an ocean.

Hyofu incense by Yamada Matsu

In French "avoir l'air de...." means to resemble something.  It literally means "has the air of"  as though one's presence actually changes the surrounding air.  I suppose it does.

Air de Paris, Marcel Duchamp, 1919, Archives Centre Pompidou

There's a commercial I keep seeing on tv.  It's for an air freshener.  It shows a man wandering through a field of blue flowers.  He's dressed like a field scientist and carries around a glass jar so that he can fill the vessel with a fragrant air specimen and bring it back to the lab for observation.  I presume a team of scientists opens the jar and is instantly transported to the field of flowers.  They then reproduce their scent impressions in aromachemicals and pthalates for Glade.*

*Since writing this post I've seen the commercial again.  It's for Airwick, not Glade.  Not only does the field scientist obtain a scent specimen in the field of blue flowers, he also takes one against a sunset background.  Presumably the air smells like sunset.