Scent of The Day: Vanille Cannelle

Sleeping Snow Bears, Carol Grigg

Today I am working and I am also coming down with a cold. The library on Sundays is always hectic and on holiday weekends even more so. So today I picked a scent purely based on the need for comfort, Comptor Sud Pacifique's Vanille Cannelle, which is exactly just that vanilla and cinnamon, two notes when combined, bring to mind so many comforting foods it is not even funny: oatmeal, oatmeal cookies, horchata, rice pudding, French toast. My mind also was drawn to the image of the bear today, I admit finding a comforting image today to go with Vanille Cannelle was rather hard, until I remembered the bear. It was strange to find though that most of the images I looked at had a masculine edge, when in my mind the bear for me has always been connected with the feminine, and most so in the catagory of the maternal. It could be from a childhood spent watching nature programs and always loving the image of mother bears with their young, most especially the image of them coming out for spring from winter hibernation, although the image was slightly marred knowing that the mother was starving due to having had her young during winter and not being able to feed to herself. But if that isn't maternal care and preserverence then I don't know what is. A great example of the maternal bear is Barbara Kingsolver's essay Small Wonder which tells the fascinating story of a toddler that was adopted by nursing female bear. Which can be found in the book Small Wonders (a collection of her essays).