We had a little bit of rain last week. It was enough to freshen things up in my corner of the world. Late one night I was walking up through the back garden in the dark. It was what I call “a turn of the property’’ and I do it almost every evening. No flashlight needed because I know the way around there like the back of my hand and there are a couple of small lights on the ground to show me the way. I liken it to “walking the deck” in my grandfather’s time. You just look around to see everything is okay at the end of the day.

I mention the rain because it is the summer rain that brings out the smell of the lilacs. We have just a few lilac trees but if you have one yourself you will know how the full bloom and that beautiful soft smell of the lilacs is fleeting. It lasts only for a week or so. The only other flower where full bloom is so transitory is the tiny blossom of the apple trees. They last less than a week. The words apple trees don’t imply an orchid. We have only a couple of trees.

What the nice gentle swell of the lilac did for me in the dark was take me back through time to where I was raised in the west end of St. John’s. There were lilac trees there too. We had one. My neighbour up the street had two trees and grandmother’s place next to ours had a couple of trees as well. The people across the street had a couple and there were some on Atlantic Avenue just across from us.

Smell is a wonderful memory trigger and the smell of lilac after a rain is the smell, or at least part of the smell, of the west end of my city. It is a smell that is clean and earthy and full of promise of a nice warm summer. There were other smells as well, not all natural, that were part of the neighbourhood. There was the smell from two bakeries. Mammy’s Bakery was a major enterprise with bread baked twice a day and there was a second smaller bakery owned by former Holy Cross goaltender Frank ‘Butsy’ Moore up in the west end of Hamilton Avenue right across from Victoria Park. The warm smell of fresh baked bread from Mammy’s Bakery and the smell of cherry tarts from Moores was real and was made large after a summer rain. It was beautiful.

The Bennett Brewery also filled the summer air. The sweet smell of hops and brewing beer was very much part of our old neighbourhood. You know I worked at Bennett’s in the plant for a couple of summers and I loved the smell of the place. It was sort of a waste on me because I didn’t drink beer or anything else at the time and the employees got a couple of free beers every day. These were different times. Drinking men making more beer. The brewery later morphed into Molson.

Now there were other smells in the west end you might not even think are possible, but they are. You could smell Horwood’s Lumber Yard. I worked there too for a few summers. You could smell the lumber and the burning wood and hear the lumber saws running. Horwood’s burned wasted wood and sawdust to generate steam heat for their operation. That also powered the great steam whistle that chimed out the hours across my part of St. John’s. The whistle told of start time, the beginning and end of lunch time and “quitting time “. The great Horwood furnace was also responsible for burning all the weed from the Tors Cove dope bust one the legal procedures were over. That is a story for another time, but you could smell it all over the city. I think it was a couple of tons of weed.

The CNR railway carried its own smell when it was active. Part of that smell was steel and part was diesel. I barely remember the old coal burning locomotives, so my memory is of diesel. The dockyard and the train repair shop were also part of that. They were all notes from the same song that was played every day. It was a song of shunting trains and whistles. Mixed in with that was the unique salty smell of the St. John’s harbour. There were still schools of herring in the harbour then but even in the sixties there was no lineup to catch them.

I don’t often think of these things but sometimes on a warm summer night after a rain when I am walking in my garden in Paradise in the quiet dark of the evening, I smell a lilac tree and it all floods back to me. They are nice thoughts.

You can contact Jim Furlong at jfurlong@ntv.ca