Il Fiume

Il fiume is one of my favourite Italian expressions.

The river.

Unsurprisingly.

When I set out to learn Italian, the language of my paternal lineage, I became absorbed in learning the words for everything around me. Naming the world again in another language.

Many years ago, while walking through the Knysna forest with a dear friend, we stopped beside a flowing river.

The water was the colour of rooibos tea. Teewater in Afrikaans. Tea water.

I remember being completely mesmerised by its scent. It smelled sweet, earthy and alive. Water running through the forest, carrying the smell of moss, wet ground and everything it had moved across.

I had learnt the Italian word for river in my tutoring that very week.

Standing there, smelling the water, I heard something else inside it.

Fiume. Perfume.

The perfume of the river.

La donna è come un fiume.

A woman is like a river.

The words feel remarkably apt. Soft enough to hold you. Strong enough to shape stone. Always flowing, moving and responding to the land, without losing her essential nature.

Never entirely still, but always herself.

It was one of those small moments in nature that asked for nothing but my attention. A word, a scent and a flowing body of water meeting at exactly the right time.

Nature is always offering itself through the senses. Colour, scent, sound, texture, temperature. Entire worlds of information available when we are present enough to notice them.

Writing this now, I am amazed, although somehow not surprised, that the fragrance I would create years later captures that same feeling for me.

Source smells like the river I remember: fresh water moving over ancient stone, through moss and across the damp forest floor.

The perfume of sweet water.