I Want to be Reincarnated as a Guava

Growing up in a family-owned grocery store in Savannah, Georgia, I was inundated by the Spring and Summer smells of the local produce. Peaches, back in the day when they not only looked gorgeous but dripped sensuality, that’s one of my strongest memories. Honeydew melons were right up there. Pears too. Then, of course, there was the headiness of berry-picking season, with my favorite always being blackberries which we could pick wild in a vacant lot catercornered from our house on Sylvan Drive.

In those days, much of the so-called exotic fruits — things like kiwis or carambola (star fruit) or pitango — just weren’t in my olfactory library because they were literally thousands of miles from where I ate. So fast forward fifty years, and Irit is preparing a fruit salad plate to take over to her daughter’s house for a birthday celebration. No big deal, right? Hmmm. I was totally unprepared for the extent to which the smell of only 3 fresh guava have completely taken over our soul food kitchen. Seriously.

I’m not complaining, mind you. It’s an amazing smell. It’s just that I’m completely blown away by the extent to which a very small parcel of fruit has completely taken over the kitchen. Completely. It’s amazing.

Quick. Without thinking too hard, name the various foods you associate with dominating smells: Garlic. Onions. Limburger cheese. Limburger cheese again. Pffffffffffff. Child’s play. All of these. What guava can teach us about total olfactory domination is a whole brave new world.

I only wish I had grown up with this smell, grown up with the associations of sight, narrative, etc. that would round out and give dimensionality to this sweet scent. But alas, no. Which leads me to a longer meditation on how smell — no matter how strong and dominant and amazing — without concomitant elements is a bit like sexual climax in a vacuum. It works, but it doesn’t really do it, if you get my drift.