The Perfumer

If Purple Haze is your strain, this is your sign: the Perfumer. The edge of the lavender field at dusk, the copper still warming over a low fire, the rows turning from blue to violet while you wait for the first drop.

If Purple Haze is your strain

You keep the last hour of the day. Everyone else leaves the field when the sun drops behind the hill, and that is when you start: fire under the copper still, the morning’s cut packed in by the armful, the lid sealed. You like the quarter of an hour when the rows go from blue to violet and the whole slope smells of what you are about to keep.

You move slowly and waste nothing. You feed the fire just enough, set your hand flat on the copper to feel it warm, and then you wait, which is the part you are best at. You notice everything with your nose first: rain two valleys away, the moment the steam turns sweet, a crate that was cut an hour too late. People think you are idle at the edge of the field. You are working.

At your best you give away what you make. The first vial of the season goes to whoever happens to be there, you can tell a neighbor which hillside their honey came from, and you remember people by the way their coats smelled the day you met. You can fit a whole field into something the size of your thumb, and you never act as if that is unusual.

Your flaw is one more batch. You smell a strip, set it down, pick it up again and decide the field has one more evening in it. There is always a batch that is nearly right. The people who love you have learned to take the vial out of your hand and tell you it is finished.

What you need is a field that faces west, a still polished by somebody who knew what they were doing, dry wood, an evening without wind and nobody asking what the smell is called. At the end of it you need a stone step to sit on and someone to hand the first drop to. Give you that, and the whole slope fits in a vial.

Your hour: The quarter hour after sunset
Your place: The copper still at the edge of the rows
Your object: A white paper smelling strip
Your pace: Low fire, long wait
Your weather: A warm evening without wind
Your flaw: One more batch

Your people

The Daydreamer (Blue Dream)The Daydreamer gets the slope at first light and you get it at last light. Between you, every good hour of light is spoken for.
The Night Owl (Purple Urkle)The Night Owl comes out as you bank the fire. You leave a strip on the wall for it; the owl has never once said whether it approves.
Cindy at Midnight (Cinderella 99)Cindy runs out of time at midnight and you run out of light at dusk. Neither of you is ever early, and both of you always make it.

Things you say

Low fire. Lavender knows when you rush it.
You can’t hurry the first drop.
Smell it twice before you decide.
Cut in the morning, fire in the evening.
One more batch.

A scene from your world

The first drop

The Perfumer lights the fire when everyone else is walking home. The cutters pass her at the bottom of the field with their empty crates and their hats in their hands, and she lifts one hand from the copper, which is as much as she says to anyone before dark.

She has kept the morning’s cut in the shade of the stone wall all day, bundles tied with twine and still cool at the center. Now she packs them into the belly of the still by the armful, presses them down with both hands, sets the domed lid and seals the seam with a strip of flour paste, the way it has always been done here. Two split logs and one small one go into the firebox. Low fire. Lavender knows when you rush it.

The sun goes behind the hill. For a quarter of an hour the rows are the color the slope is known for: blue at the near end, violet in the middle, nearly black where they climb into the dark. Steam begins to lift from the seams and drift out over the field, white at first, then lilac in the last light, until the whole slope looks as if it is breathing out.

She stands by the cooling tank with her palm on the copper, feeling it warm. Water runs through the coil. The glass flask on its stand stays empty. Moths arrive. A dog barks once at the farm on the next ridge. She takes a paper strip from her apron pocket and holds it, because there is nothing yet, and that is the part most people cannot bear and she has come to like best.

Then the first drop. It gathers at the end of the coil, round and slow, and falls into the flask, then another, and on top of the water a thin pale-gold film begins to spread: the oil, which never mixes, which floats on the water that carried it. She touches the very tip of the strip to it, passes it twice under her nose and closes her eyes.

Sharp first, like a cut stem. Then the warm middle, the part that smells of the whole hillside at noon. Then, under it, something she was not expecting this year: honey, a little hay, and the stone of the wall where the bundles waited all day. She opens her eyes. It is better than last year. She will not say so for at least a week.

She writes nothing down. She corks the first vial and sets it on the wall to cool where the evening star can see it, then feeds the fire one more small log. “One more batch,” she tells the field, which has heard that before.

The field

The still: A copper still older than the farmhouse, its swan neck dented in two places. It is polished every spring and never in front of anyone.
The rows: Lavender planted along the slope, facing west. In the quarter hour after sunset they turn blue, then violet, then dark, starting at the bottom.
The flask: A glass flask on a wooden stand at the end of the coil. The oil floats on the water that carried it, which is the whole secret.
The stone wall: A dry-stone wall at the edge of the field, where the morning’s bundles wait in the shade and the first vial of the season is set to cool.
The drying barn: A small stone barn at the top of the field with one doorway. The bundles that are not for the still hang upside down from its beams.
The strips: White paper strips, cut by hand and kept in the apron pocket. Each one is used once, smelled twice and fed to the fire.