Grading Rose Oil at the Copper Stills

The trucks start arriving a little after six, and by seven the yard smells of crushed green stems. I stand at the gate with a clipboard nobody looks at, because the drivers know me and I know their fields. May is the only month I am never at my desk. Twenty-nine days of it, if the weather is fair.

The distillery is a low white building with three copper stills and a concrete floor that is always wet somewhere. Inside, the air is thick enough to lean on. I work at a narrow table by the window, with a lamp, a rack of glass strips, and my reference vials: oils from the last eleven springs, kept in a cool box like something alive.

A good oil does not announce itself. It arrives quietly, and then it refuses to leave.

The petals go in around noon and the first oil comes off the still in the evening. What I grade is not the flower but the decision the distiller made: when to cut, how hot, how long. Three drops on a strip, wait thirty seconds, smell the dry end and then the wet one. The dry end tells the truth.

What I Am Actually Looking For

Not the perfume of a rose. That is what visitors want and it is the least useful thing in the room. I am looking for the stem, the green crush, a little hay, a little honey, and underneath all of it, the wax. No wax and the oil will feel thin by November. A burnt note at the back means the fire ran hot and somebody was in a hurry.

People imagine grading is romantic. It is mostly saying no. On a good day I will call nine of forty samples first grade, twenty of them second, and the rest go into soap or into the bin, and the bin is not a metaphor. The distiller argues. I have learned to let him argue for exactly as long as it takes him to smell the strip himself.

By the tenth sample the roses and I have stopped being polite to each other.

Around four the light turns and my nose starts lying. I keep clean wool in my coat pocket and I go stand by the door for two minutes, breathing nothing in particular. It is not a cure. It is a way of admitting that the instrument needs a rest before it can be trusted again.

The Floor at the End of the Day

When the last batch is done, the spent petals get shoveled out and the floor is hosed down, and the whole building gives up a smell like jam left in the sun. I take my boots off at the door of my own flat. My coat hangs outside. I wash my hair twice and it still holds.

In the morning a colleague will stand too close, sniff, and say, you have been at the stills, and I will say, I have been nowhere else. That is the whole month. I am thirty years old and I have smelled something close to a million roses, and what I remember from May is wet concrete and a clipboard nobody looks at.