The Truth My Bones Know

It is the season of hot, white blooming things–honeysuckle, jasmine, gardenia… The light this time of year, the air and the scent that weighs heavily on the breeze transports me back across a lifespan of deep, sensual awareness. It carries me from hopeful innocence to the anxious stirrings of adolescence and into mid-life where I hold on to an idealized longing for some kind of transcendent recognition in another. How can the sensation not be real when my bones know it so profoundly?

I am a small girl, probably six, and I step out into the first early morning of the long stretch of summer. I leave behind me an apartment filled with walls painted avocado green and too many intensely frustrated people packed into too few rooms. Right there at the threshold of this painfully plain building is a large unidentified shrub of glossy green leaves and white blossoms sending out an intoxicating aroma. I let my bare feet land in a mound of dew-coated grass on this summer morning just starting to heat up under a cloudless sky. In that moment, I believe that the months ahead will envelope me in a gauzy wrap of seemingly endless days and boundless exploration. It soothes in me the impact of the chaos I’ve just left behind.

Now I am 12 and I walk through the woods with a boy my age who will become the person I fall most madly in love with in my whole life. He is charming and persuasive beyond his years and he leads me to a pier on a little lake at the edge of the sheltered area. There we lay down and kiss for a long time. The inside of his mouth is deep and warm and his breath has a smell that I come to recognize as his own. The scent of wild honeysuckle swirls around an already heady experience. I’m sure he only wanted to see how far he could take me, and I went willingly. But I wonder now if all that love that took me so long to shake was really for him or for the air and the possibility of some deep and mysterious connection that ended abruptly and too soon.

And then I stand out in the late night parking lot of the community college with a long haired, skinny boy from my writing class who strings together beautiful words. He is a musician and a poet and he stays a long time to talk with me. From some unknown place in the distance the scent of gardenias or jasmine travels to fill the air around us, and I allow myself to imagine that, though his frame is slight and possibly even fragile, this just might be the one who will have the power to see the things my bones know. He makes me mix tapes and I fall in love with the idea of him through the odd articulations of Kate Bush, the meandering stories of Bob Dylan and the nasally philosophy of Neil Young. Though the boy’s physical presence has long since faded away, decades later I can still play those tapes in the cassette deck of my ancient Toyota and feel the intoxication of the fragrant night and the stimulating conversation.

And here now at 52, sinking deeper into mid-life, I ride my bike all around the neighborhood in the late light of a spring day catching the deeply warm fragrance of the white, flowering things that grow in people’s landscapes and others in the wild spaces. I plant jasmine in my moon garden and let its rambling vines go unmanicured. I invite it’s perfume to lift my spirit back into the realm of belief that there is someone else out there who also carries in their marrow the knowledge of how something like a scent can stitch together decades and render Logic speechless.