There was a summer camp I went to as a pre-teen and teenager, where I learned to ride horses, shoot arrows, swim, paddle a canoe, identify species of plants and bugs. There were campfires at night where we sang songs around the warmth and glow of the fire, there were instructional classes every day, reveille at six in the morning as we all struggled out of bed and gathered around the flagpole before breakfast to watch the American flag raised as we pledged allegiance, group dining in the big Mess Hall and games of softball, touch football and capture the flag, swimming competitions, canoe races across the surface of the cold dark lake.
But what I remember the most is the horseback riding — how huge the horses were to me when I was young and still growing. Their rich, sweaty smell as I leaned into them to cup a hoof in one hand and use a small metal pick to clean out the dirt from around their horseshoes. The aroma of hay, leather saddles and bridles, manure, urine, the cedar shavings and straw that lined the floors of the stalls, the warmth of the horses’ skin as I brushed them down, cleaned out their manes and tails, stroked their long faces, fed them sugar cubes from a brown paper bag.
Complex elements that all join together to form the recollected smell of a shaded horse barn on a hot summer day.
This is Dzing! Animal sweat. Hay. Leather. Horse urine. Sugar cubes. Cedar shavings. Barn wood. A field of grass baking in the sun. A hint of wildflowers in the breeze.
I always approach the BF when I first try a new fragrance, and his response is usually, “Oh, that smells just like Calvin Klein (fill-in-the-blank)” — but not today. He sniffed, his eyes lit up. “That’s masculine,” he said. He took another sniff and smiled a little. “You dirty boy!”
***Note: Dzing! changes with time into a far different creature. Soft. Tame. With breath like warm vanilla sugar.
Photos of Dzing! below:
{ 1 comment }
Love your blog and love DZing. I don’t get so much of the horse droppings – it’s sweetly spicy on me with just a touch of animal and burning rubber.
By the way, did you pull all-nighters at camp or did you actually have “reveille” at 6am?
(had to)
Nathan replies:
Ha! Thank you. “reveille” fixed!
And Dzing! started off on my skin in supra-animalic mode. It wasn’t until an hour or so later that I began to get anything sweet off of it.