There are smells that transport you. It’s instant. As if a time machine existed! It is enough to breathe so that that particle lacks time to reach the brain and move you from space, to time, to your state of mind. It’s not that aromas bring back memories, it’s that they bring you back to memory. To that grandmother’s soup with rosemary on a rainy autumn afternoon, to playing hide-and-seek among the hanging clothes, to that summer among orange trees in Andalusia, to the warm stone of the farmhouse when returning home after a few days. To that chocolate you had after your first day of school, to the pine burning in the fireplace during the winters, to the walks through the forest looking for snails, to the last inspiration before “I do”.
Ten thousand. We are able to distinguish people from ten thousand smells. Can you imagine the number of experiences that fit into ten thousand aromas? I would like to name my favorite and I get so many at once! Wet earth, strawberries with cinnamon, freshly cut grass, pumpkin soup, lavender bathed in the sun, a baby’s head, sea water dried on the skin. We can even smell things that cannot be smelled: winter cold, spring day; Sometimes you smell love, sometimes you smell tension, sometimes you smell peace.
And if only they could smell each other! That the aromas also know. They know about taste, but they also know about knowing. To know how to use them. I think now of this ancestral knowledge, of the gardens with aromatic herbs for healing and cooking. How much have we lost from all this? How much can we still save? And no, in this house we don’t know how to sit still: we get an idea in our head and we don’t stop until it is a reality – in fact, we continue without stopping, because there will always be something else we can do with it. Well, this is what has happened to us with aromas… they smell, they taste, they enter your head and your thoughts begin to boil… and yes, we now have our garden of aromatic herbs! with (get ready): a thousand plants planted with pick and shovel. It has been a very good way to start the week!
You already know that our link with culinary tradition goes back years, centuries. And the idea of being able to directly access rosemary, basil, and mint is fantastic to us. Have and delight in its taste, its properties, its aroma. Being able to show them, make them known to the hundreds and thousands of boys and girls who come every year to live together, to enjoy, to learn, to be filled with experiences and memories, and smells. Because the smells transport you, and it will be an honor to make you return, even for a moment, to Can Ribas.
