The scent of Sebastopol in summer

A child of Sebastopol, now grown and flown, looks back on one of the ineffable qualities of her hometown

Dawn on the Joe Rodota Trail in August. (Photo by Larry Robinson)

By Allegra Diamond

Sonoma county has a specific smell in the summer. It’s the smell of over-ripe apples, hot blackberries, dirt, dry grass, skunk (and skunky weed), and ocean mist. That’s a scent I haven’t lived with since I graduated from Analy High School in 2016. Since then, I moved to Berkeley, Israel, France, back to Berkeley, San Francisco, Denmark, Australia, and finally, the Czech Republic where I’ve spent the past year.

Over the past year and a half, I, and everyone under the age of 30 according to TikTok, have become fascinated by fragrance. I’ve had strangers stop to ask me what I’m wearing, friends want my advice on their new “signature scent,” and campers on the teen travel programs I was leading beg me for extra free time in any city so they could pop into a perfume shop.

As for me, I’ve been on a mission to find a perfume that smells like home. I didn’t realize that was my goal until I was transported back to Sebastopol while standing in the produce aisle of a Czech grocery store. As I went to adjust my mask, I caught a whiff of the tomatoes I had just put into my basket. Not the tomatoes themselves, the vine.

My mom had a garden in our big backyard on Barlow Lane. Not in town, but right on the outskirts. She used to send me out with an old yoghurt container and ask me to fill it with cherry tomatoes. I’d sit in the dirt searching through the vines for little red or orange gems. They were always warm and a little dusty and it always took me longer than necessary to fill the bucket (I developed a “one for the container, one for me” policy at a young age). I’d come back into the house a while later with the bucket in one hand and the other clutching my oversized t-shirt into a homemade pouch for the rest of the tomatoes. My hands would smell like vines for hours after. As if fuzzy green and slightly sticky had a smell.

Wearing perfume is a way to share who you are with the world without saying a word. I’m a Sonoma County girl no matter where I live. Sonoma County smells like home, and I want to carry that with me. I’ve spent hours trying to find it bottled, going through all the categories: green, woody, floral, earthy, fougère, chypre (words I don’t even understand) to find one that captures the specific essence of here. I haven’t had luck yet. Since I can’t find that scent, I’ll just keep coming home to smell the real thing.