North of Boston by Elisabeth Elo Page A

groceries and gas at a little Inuit settlement called Hopedale. The next part of the journey—from Hopedale to the house—sticks in my mind as the longest, possibly because it consisted of bouncing crazily on narrow, deeply rutted roads that couldn’t possibly have accommodated another car, had we ever met one, and were probably impassable when it snowed. When we finally rounded the last curve and the architect’s creation rose in the dusty windshield, it looked to my tired eyes as splendid and unlikely as a storybook house.
    The interior of the house smelled like what lay outside the windows—pine and birch forests, smooth gray rocks, the dark blue Labrador Sea. We spent much of our time on the cedar deck, reading or talking or playing go fish, my mother usually in a wide-brimmed hat, smoking occasionally, smiling easily and often, sometimes stretching out and murmuring dreamily like a person floating on a cloud.
    Within a week of our arrival, the rough-hewn kitchen table would be heaped with treasures of the natural world—berries, lichen, mosses, grasses, flowers stuck in jars of water or left to dry, clumps of dirt still hanging off their roots. Most days we’d roam outside without counting the hours, carrying wicker baskets that in my memory are always filled to the top. I remember how she would pick something, hold it, look at it, rub it between her fingers, put it to her nose. I’d follow, doing the same, not knowing anything in particular, simply putting into my basket whatever was pretty or strange, whatever gave off a scent that brought pleasure, comfort, excitement, or shock.
    A local man acted as our guide, brought us to places we could never have found by ourselves, through marshes and on woody trails. He had a son a few years older than I was, with long black hair that shimmered in the sunlight when he ran. We played in an intense, wordless way. One day he laughed at me over his shoulder, so I climbed a dipping birch branch, scrambled higher, and enjoyed his anxiety when he couldn’t find me. When he got close enough, I pelted him with broken-off twigs, and shimmied down the smooth trunk. And we set off again.
    There were flowers everywhere. Blue flag irises dotted the fields, emitting their sweetly seductive odor. The pitcher plant, which captured insects in its thick, waxy petals, smelled old and sour.
    The flower that would eventually change our lives was called Labrador tea. It grew in bogs and swampy forests and bloomed obligingly in our month of July—clusters of tiny white flowers with dark elliptical leaves fuzzy brown on the underside. When a whole field was in bloom, the plant’s strong aroma hung over the area like a fog. Some people thought it had a narcotic effect, that you could fall asleep in a field and wake up with a headache. Others believed that it inspired creativity and love. Labrador tea is a slow-growing species, so we picked only a few flowers and leaves from each plant and put them in cloth bags. At home we hung them to dry, an act they seemed unwilling to perform, stubbornly emitting their brash, soporific, bright lemony fragrance, remaining moist long after other flowers had become brittle and easy to crush.
    The most exotic of our treasures was ambergris, which is an oily, resinous substance that a whale either vomits or excretes into the ocean. It achieves a rich, dirty marine smell after years of floating under the sun. We found it by scouring the shores, where it occasionally washes up in black chunks that can be as small as a pebble, as big as your fist, or as huge as a piece of driftwood. I remember my mother’s delight whenever we came across a piece. Though it was a rare find, there is probably no better place in the world for collecting ambergris than the area around Hopedale, whose Inuit name, Agvituk, means “place of the whales.”
    Add to all this the essences my mother brought from home—jasmine, tuberose,