I walk down the street in my neighborhood when I’m stopped in my tracks by the scent of honeysuckle. Suddenly I am that magical age of six, running through the secret passage between a honeysuckle hedge and neighbor’s fence back in Murray, Kentucky. Honeysuckle always does that to me, but these days, in Chicagoland, the scent of honeysuckle is much more elusive. Most of the varieties of honeysuckle that grow this far north aren’t fragrant, though I occasionally catch a drift of the scent.
I think about other gardens I’ve been in throughout the years. Last summer we spent 10 days in a house on a cliff on the coast of Spain. The garden was filled with edenic trees: orange and lemon, honeysuckle, jasmine. In the thick night air the fragrances would come alive, particularly the jasmine, whose potent, exotic fragrance transported me to places I’d never been. Every night I would go out to the garden to drink in the fragrance, hoping it would somehow stay with me. In some ways the memory of it did help to pass the long, bitterly cold winter that followed. Scents have a way of transporting us back to distant memories in a way that no
other sense does. But it’s also the most difficult to conjure; while we can bring up images or sounds in our minds, it’s much more difficult to bring up scents. But as I walk down the street drinking in the fragrance of an early summer evening, I realize that while I can’t bring past fragrances to my nose, I can still remember the feeling they brought. Just remembering the jasmine brings me back to that garden in Nerja for a moment and I feel a deep-down gladness for having gotten to be there at one moment time.
Back to the present. We’re constantly in the process of reliving memories and adding new ones. I think about being in the yard with my daughter a few weeks ago. I was pushing her on the swing; she was laughing and I could sense in her that exhilarating swing feeling of flying and freedom. The last few blooming lilacs wafted over to us and filled the air for a moment. I drank it in, storing the scent in my memory bank. And it occurred to me that just maybe, decades from now, she’ll be walking down the street when the scent of lilac will bring her back to a perfect early summer day, flying high in a swing and laughing with her mom.
June 2014
