There is a little bit of magic in all our lives. But do we always notice and acknowledge it?

I, personally, look for magic and find it more often than not, and finding magic can make a mundane and ordinary day into an extra-ordinarily happy one, it makes you feel special, it makes you feel that the universe thinks about you and cares for you and that you will be fine, no matter what rages around you.

This is an account of a little bit of fragrant magic that tickled my nose a couple of days back.

Since my partner and I pretty much lived from one travel to another, the hiatus that the dastardly Coronavirus has brought to this activity means that we have had to learn to live our life differently. Yet the travel bug causes an itch ever so often, re-living memories of old trips is the only salve for the present.

Last week we were going through our photos from 2018, of a trip to Finland at this time of the year. I shared the Facebook memory from our stay at a resort in Kivijarvi in Central Finland and in response a lovely Finnish lady whom we had befriended at the same resort in 2018, commented that she was there as she wrote. I replied, asking her to remember us to the beautiful Kivijarvi and to enjoy on our behalf as well.

One of the memories synonymous with Kivijarvi, is a sensory memory, that of the sweet perfume that is emitted when you burn logs with lichen growing on them. We had been in Finland some two weeks before we reached the resort at Kivijarvi, and even though every place we had stayed at, had had a fireplace with the fire set-up, we had not lit a single one, feeling anxious that our lack of experience in how to go about it may render the wooden cabins unsafe. While in Kivijarvi we decided it was not rocket science, and not wanting to miss out on the opportunity went ahead and lit one. Soon after lighting the fire, a sweet smell pervaded our cabin, we were perplexed, we tried to solve the mystery, we checked for spills from our perfume bottles and found none. It was only when my partner went to add a log to the fire that he noticed the lichen and figured out that that was our fragrant friend.

We continued to light the fire the entire week we were in there and thoroughly enjoyed, what we termed as our aroma therapy.

Now let’s transport back to the present. A day after the Facebook post sharing the memories of Kivijarvi and the comment from my Finnish friend, I entered my living room late at night and was enveloped with the sweet smell of burning lichen, I was nonplussed, I attributed it to my fecund imagination and ability to re-create sensations felt in the past, I said nothing. A minute later my partner entered the room and started looking for a fire, I knew then that it was not my imagination.

That night the perfume surrounded us, we sat in silence, the memories of Finland and Kivijarvi playing in our mind, the endless blue water, the green woods, the colourful wildflowers thronging the roads, the midnight sun, playing Mölkky with our Finnish friends and on and on.

There was no explanation for the fragrance. We were in the height of summer, it was late night, there was no fire lit in our house or in the vicinity, not that the wood would even have lichen in our neck of the woods. We felt blessed, chosen, special. The only explanation – Magic. Our friend in Finland probably lit a fire, thought of us and sent scent magic our way. Thank you life, friend and Universe!

Look for your little bit of Magic….