JOY ALONG THE WAY: WHERE HAS THE SIMPLE SCENT OF VIOLET GONE?

Vanilla Fields, White Shoulders, Obsession, Windsong, etc., are all perfumes. Lovely names, but whatever happened to just plain Rose, Violet, Lilac, etc.? Especially Violet?

I visited the city stores before Christmas and nowhere could I find anything -- soap, lotion, perfume -- with a violet scent. Maybe, I thought, violet perfume was always just a product of chemical mixtures. I have held handfuls of spring violets to my nose and never discovered a distinct floral scent. There is a flower in the nursery catalogs that is called Sweet Violet. Perhaps I've never come in contact with this variety. But I think I know what is called the fragrance of violet and have known it for a long time. One of my earliest Christmas gifts was a can of talcum powder so named Violet. I carried it around with me like Linus does (Did? It is sorrowful to have to use the past tense for Peanuts characters) with his security blanket. The sides of the tin talc container were a yellowish green and on each side were pictures of a bouquet of violets. Lovely little things, intermingled with picoted lavender ribbons. Santa (Mama) couldn't have given anything that pleased me as much that Christmas.

All down through the many years since, I have been able to get something violet scented. Yardley has been there for me. Perhaps they still are.

I asked at the local stores for something so scented. "Violet?" the clerks asked as if they'd never heard of it. They brought me lavender and a couple of other purple lotions with strange sounding names, all pleasant but not Violet. Finally a saleslady, evidently getting tired of my quest said, "I think you will have to go to some of the big metropolises to find that." I wondered why. They had all the aforementioned perfumes plus Red, Beautiful, Anais-Anais, Chantilly, Chanel #5 and countless others. No Violet. I wanted to counter with, "Why? We're pretty much on-line here, www.cape dough.com." I felt insulted and almost called Speak Out.

Instead, amidst all the holiday rush and rumble, my curiosity was so aroused, I went straight to my sets of encyclopedias to do one of my little 40 page booklets, this time on perfumery. It starts out, "Perfumers learned very early that the best perfumes do not come form a single source. They are made by skillful blenders of plant, animal and artificial scents."

I quickly got to plants. "Fragrant plants have tiny sacs in which they store their fragrance substance. This substance is called essential oil. Unlike a skunk who only raises his tail to spray out his essential oil, plant oil sacs must be emptied by a process called enfluerage and extraction. Glass plates are covered with fat (Crisco? Butter?) and flower petals are spread over it. The fat absorbs the essential oil from the plants. Then this oil is put into a closed container with alcohol and heated. The alcohol dissolves the essential oil and it rises to the top of the fat. Like cream on milk, and, presto, there is the fragrant essential oil with which to make perfume. A ton of petals gives off about 10 ounces of essential oil. Would all the violets in the Bootheel weigh a ton?

"Luckily, modern perfumers can mix chemicals, more easily available than a ton of violet petals, and arrive at the longed-for violet scent. But, through some pre-Y2K snafu the resulting product has not yet reached my city."

Ah, well, I sit and write these things in the fragrance-sprayed atmosphere of Lavender, the next best thing and easy to come by.

So, into the new century I go, paraphrasing "The Psalm of Life:"

Let me then be up and doing

With curiosity as my fate.

Still inquiring, still perceiving

E'en though I labor and sometimes wait.

REJOICE!