Santa Ana Winds

This is one of those scents you have to catch early in the morning, before all the moisture’s been leached out of the air and you can’t smell anything at all. First is the last vestiges of the cool morning air that’s rapidly warming up, followed by the rarely encountered smell of mature leaves blowing against each other–there’s eucalyptus, sure, but also additional green smells from the olive, citrus and avocado trees in the back yard–that aren’t as pungent or moist as freshly mown grass, but are still identifiably vegetal. The wind-chimes and rustling leaves add to the excitement that the Santa Ana’s always seem to bring, and there’s probably already a spiky-stemmed palm frond or two on the front lawn that needs to be carefully carted to the side of the house. Later in the day the smoke from the inevitable wildfires reminds everyone of one of the downsides of living in the Golden State.

Airport – Outside

The smell of diesel mixed with the heavy morning moisture of fog. Whether or not I’m the one going on a trip, that smell always bestows the feeling of excitement and anticipation, of something new happening, or a discovery to be made.

I think my first exposure to this smell might have been right before my first airplane flight, age 4, leaving LAX with its amazingly beautiful control tower. My family was going to visit our relatives across the country. I wore a new blue dress and spilled my iced tea all over it en route. It’s quite possible that I’d been exposed to the smell before my first journey, either picking up my dad or dropping him off to make a similar trip. It’s also likely that this smell got conflated with the unique but similar diesel smells of some of the rides at Disneyland, which would explain the almost childlike glee I still feel when I catch a whiff today.