The house that summer entered
Summer came in later than we invited it and did not apologize.
Sun. Heat on the glass. A storm that left the outside smelling of wet wood. We opened the windows and the season walked the length of the studio as if it already knew the room.
It did. The studio was already set. Most of the essences in this house are long companions. Most perfume compositions were ready months before anyone could find the door to Opimae. Summer did not start the work. It only changed the light on it.
This studio is a house. It welcomes what arrives. It holds what wants to live here.
Visitors
Lavender was the new one this summer.
It came in small bottles from more than one pair of hands. Each a different weather. One brighter, almost sharp. One softer, closer to flower. One that carried the dry heat of a field we have stood in and a perfume we still cannot name. We stand before is not the lavender-lemon lavender. It is the kind that inspires unorthodox ideas. The raw, uneven one that arrives before anyone has decided what it is for.
We lived with them among other essences that already knew the studio. We put them in the air and waited. Days. The house shifted a little, then went back to being itself — only now with this new voice in it. We may be holding something there. We’ll see if the Circle senses it too.
A whole new batch of Labrador tea arrived this summer.
This one knows the house by heart. In Perseids. In the East Coast trail. In the yoga mornings. What arrived was the first batch from 2025. A new year is always special — not because the last one had anything, but because a harvest is anchored in time and space, and so the date is one way of telling the truth about a plant.
We picked up the phone to thank the farmer. In the same current: the tea is being gathered again after a short pause. Not worried, but. Two weeks left, if the weather holds. Overall a good season for the plant. We won't be running out of tea in 2028.
These essences will never become furniture. They keep a season in them. Some year they abound. Some year they are rarer. You learn to live with that. Or you don't.
Voices
Emails found their way too.
Someone wrote that One Summer Afternoon at Higgins Beach was the best thing he ever scented in his life. Probably an exaggeration. But love is love, and summer permits exaggeration. The sentence sat here for a while and made our day. Higgins is birch and fir and a bright floral cut through wood — you know it if you have lived with it — and now it was also a man, somewhere, leaving a window open on purpose. The perfume, our very first one, had been finished a long time. This email is why we do this.
Perseids came back too. Not the bottle. The night. People telling us they couldn’t believe North American botanicals could speak this way. Warm resin. Skin that had been in the sun. Sage underneath, holding. We love Perseids.
Speaking of wild sage. This one has that kind of voice. It has been here with us for only a brief amount of time. We thought it would leave, but it never really did. It still stands near the bench as if there were another story to tell. There may be. Not this month.
Another conversation. Sweetfern is apparently having the summer of its life. We have been in conversation with that plant for a while. This season the plant raced ahead of its patch of land. It grew as if it had decided it did not need permission into the neighboring blueberry fields. Regenerative is a beautiful word. But this was closer to conquering. The neighbors with rakes would not thank us for the metaphor.
The argument
Staying with Sweetfern — it is the most complex essence we have (Eva calls it complicated). Camphor sits in it like a fact. Give it the wrong company and the room goes medicinal. Give it too little and you have only the strangeness — something you can point at, but not live inside.
We have tried.
Is it different? Yes.
Is it full resolution? Not yet.
Many versions later there is still no winner. This summer the plant took ground almost everywhere it seems, but almost none in the studio. We keep the trials. We do not pretend we are close.
All the opposite of balsam fir.
We have lived with that old wood long enough to think we understood it. Modest yet resourceful. And so easy to treat badly: the festive forest, the car freshener, and the thousands of chemical copycats. We very well know that. We have decided to make it true. It was already in Higgins. Already in the White Mountains. We couldn't do without it in our latest creation: Morning Yoga in the Eastern Townships. We had not asked it to surprise us again. It simply did.
Some essences argue for a long time. Some help, and then help differently. The house need both.
The door
In July we opened the website door a crack. Those we invited came in.
In August we opened it fully. The house could now be found. The first small batches had been waiting. What changed was not the work. What changed is more people could walk through. Emails and orders came in. Then went out. Opimae perfume is a wind that was already moving in the studio; it finally reaches other rooms.
September. The light comes in lower. Sweetfern will not resolve because the door opened. Lavender will not become a perfume because the site was live. A house can receive the world and still keep a long conversation in the back room.
It is time to go back to the bench.
