Scent – perhaps the most powerful of all our senses – is often highly overlooked, especially here in the city. We are such a visual culture. Always looking at things to glean understanding. Or we focus on sound – expecting that voices or spoken words give us the information we seek. Taste and touch are there too, but often seem to fall in the background, somewhere between a warm meal and a warm embrace.
All of these things, of course are a gift. But for me, there is something overwhelmingly intoxicating about aroma. In particular, the scent of all the citrus blooms that are bursting everywhere right now. My ‘perfect moment’ is sitting out in a field somewhere in the middle of a massive orange grove, blinded by green leaves, orange fruits and tiny white blossoms that make the air vibrate with perfume and the sound of ecstatic bees.
Since open fields and expanses of orange groves are scarce here in Los Angeles, I’ve done a mini-version of this experience for myself here in my small garden. I’ve placed potted citrus trees by my front door so I can enjoy them on the way in and out of my house. And I’ve also strategically placed three of these beauties right outside my bedroom window, so that when the sun is rising, or setting or in the middle of a warm LA day, I can lie in bed or just stand at the window and take in that divine scent – the one that the bees know so well. It’s heaven!
Sometimes I wish I was born a bee, visiting a few thousand flowers in my lifetime, making sweet honey, communing with my sisters and then calling it all ‘done’ after a few short weeks on this earth. That sounds like a pretty good gig to me.
But since the most impatient person (ie me) will probably live to 100, I’m expecting to be here for a very long time. So, I’ll happily ‘make due’ befriending the citrus blooms, enjoying their beauty and making honey in my heart with the scent that for some reason or another, reminds me of Home.
True Love
