In The Country of the Pointed Firs, Sarah Orne Jewett wrote of a woman named Mrs. Almira Todd, who lived in a clapboard house on the coast of Maine—a gardener and a landlady and “an ardent lover of herbs, both wild and tame.” They grew out from her gray-shingled walls and up her steep gables, like hair with stray flowers caught in it.
As a tenant in Mrs. Todd’s home, the writer felt “the sea-breezes [blow] into the low end-window of the house laden not only with sweet-brier and sweet-mary, but balm and sage and borage and mint, wormwood and southernwood.”[i]
Within a few weeks of arriving on the rocky coast of Dunnet Landing, the writer had already learned Mrs. Todd’s ways. From her room, she could tell exactly where Mrs. Todd was in her garden simply by the smell wandering from outside:
“If Mrs. Todd had occasion to step into the far corner of her herb plot, she trod heavily upon thyme, and made its fragrant presence known with all the rest. …You could always tell when she was stepping about there, even when you were half awake in the morning, and learned to know, in the course of a few weeks’ experience, in exactly which corner of the garden she might be.”[ii]
I like how I can know where flowers and folks are by their smell. The air in March is thin and sharp, so out my back door, I can sometimes catch the scent of forsythia or cut grass or the lavender of my neighbor’s laundry on the breeze.
Jared and I looked into his beehives last week, and he told me to put my nose to a frame full of bees. At first, I only smelled smoke and wax, but then I caught it. Coming from the frame was a faint hint of the nectar of spring flowers—pear or redbud or clover. The bees go their way in the world, but standing at their hive, a beekeeper can tell where they’ve been.
I like that, too.
It says that Adam and Eve could hear the Lord God walking in his garden in the cool of the day, and I wonder if they could smell him too, as his holy tread stirred up the scents of the lotus and lilies. The Gardener’s scent trails him across the Scriptures, as he brings things to life and turns them green.
“For I will pour water on the thirsty land,
and streams on the dry ground…
They shall spring up among the grass
like willows by flowing streams.”
~ Isaiah 44:3-4
God’s people are known by their love, which should follow us like a fragrance. Like Mrs. Todd in her garden and the bees in their hives, people should know where we’ve been by the scent of Christ that clings to us. Like Mary, our service to him should fill the room and float out the windows. In fact, I’ve caught its scent coming from my own church: Jim’s coffee, Cindy’s meals, Kelly’s gentleness, Bob’s wisdom, Mary’s smile. Christ in us and through us “spreads the fragrance of the knowledge of him everywhere” (2 Cor. 2:14).
For me, I’d like to be known by the smell of daffodils or oregano, laundry or sourdough, or the garden plants I tread underfoot as I carry the name of Christ into the world.
{i} Sarah Orne Jewett, The Country of the Pointed Firs. (Simon & Schuster Editions: New York, NY. 1997), 20
bethanyjmelton.com 