Honeysuckle

I remember a two-story wooden house with a balcony patio off the second floor, set off the road by at least an eighth of a mile of gravel drive. A tobacco farmer lived on one side of us, and his fields wrapped around our back yard where he would bail hay every year into those large round bails. Upstairs in his two-story barn, a large door on side hinges opened, aerating gigantic draping me-sized tobacco leaves hanging from their stalks – dark pungent curtains swaying ever so slightly in the gentle Kentucky breeze.

Opposite the tobacco barn lived a family of five, with a son my age. Next door to them was a brood of seven whose youngest was five years my senior. This memory of the two-story wooden house is my first childhood home and the family of seven our first family friends. The oldest son found a lost two-year-old, wandering the cornfield separating our homes. Our families have been friends every since.

There were collectively about nine children living within a radius of four houses on a long country road that had no proper name. Though the wooden house set off the road wasn’t a farm house and only produced children, the memories of that place are potent and happy — attempting to ice skate in sneakers on a pond the size of an above ground pool, farm animals, tobacco, corn, surrounding woods that went on endlessly littering the bluegrass — all sound tracked by John Denver’s “Country Road.”

Things happen in the woods – fantastic, magical, majestic things. Secrets are made and left in the woods. It’s where stories find their settings, adventures develop their characters, and princes find their princess. Within my woods after a clouded memory of a five-minute walk, trees gave way to space and a gigantic sand bar. Here, I became a grand conqueror whose mission was to battle the enemy amongst fallen tree trunks and large truck tires left behind from a lost generation with their prehistoric antiques.

Memories of the sand bar are faded, viewed through a soft focus lens now. My memories of it are long lasting; I still see what it looked like walking along the trail coming through the clearing. However, my clearest memory of this place is honeysuckle.

The trail was lined with honeysuckle, and the summer fragrance of the blooming plant mixed with adventure and the wonder of a preschooler, lacing itself around my mind and enveloping nostalgia. It was a smell of purity and a definition of childhood.

Honeysuckle is the aroma of my childhood.

Honeysuckle smells to me how silk feels: soft and angelic, lightly caressing, and slowly embracing my memories. It is as if God romances me with flowers, and his gift to me is honeysuckle. Honeysuckle evokes excitement in me, reminding me of possibility, of purity, and rightness in the world – the wonder of a child and the excitement of what could be just through the clearing. In the spring when the buds are starting and give way to summer, honeysuckle wafts through the air and arrests my attention, flooding me with memory full of adventure and excitement, lightening bugs, and summer. It focuses my attention and allows me to submerge myself in the possibility of my daydreams and let the smell wrap itself all around me once again like an old friend hugging me in reunion. It smells of hope and reminds me I am still that little girl in God’s eyes. It reminds me to keep dreaming, to keep seeking out the trails that lead to the next clearing, encouraging me to keep seeking what could be with in that clearing. It reminds me no matter how old I get I will always be that little girl ready to go on a grand adventure and scale the mountain! No matter where the trails traversed, there will be little things like honeysuckle lined along the way to remind me I am greatly loved and never traveling alone.