Scented Sensibility

I rose early…early for me, anyway…and bustled about my morning routine, working hard to get out of the house before my usual half-hour-later-than-I-should. The cat had been fed and medicated, the dog had been given her forty minutes in the sun before being crated for the day, and I was set to head out.

I unlocked the door, stepped out on my back deck…and it hit me.

I am not the world’s most effective, diligent amateur landscaper. I mow the grass… or the dirt… from the comfortable yellow seat of my green John Deere lawn tractor; I cut the whole yard, bermuda, crabgrass and sandstone disguised as soil, in about an hour; but I don’t usually get the trimmer out to trim the grass under the flowering-whatever trees or edge the edges or trim the boxwoods by the front porch more than once a…month? A year?

Whatever.

And I don’t worry about the vine growing all over one side of my rear deck. The vine that is overcoming the Sky-chair stand, and the wire utility shelf, the deck rail, and slowly crawling up through the screen over the kitchen window. The vine that will probably take over the whole back wall of the house someday.

The honeysuckle vine.

I know. It’s agressive. It’s wild. It’s untamed. It’s getting more nourishment than it needs from its roots in the old compost bin. It will challenge kudzu with its threat to life, liberty and the occasional small animal. It will become a nuisance, maybe even a danger in its moist leafy weight.

It smells like Heaven. Its scent is dawn on a summer day. Its scent is a childhood memory of my brother showing me how to find a drop of candy by gently pulling the stamens out through the base of the flower and putting the nectar on my tongue, and his laugh as he saw my surprise. Its scent turns my overrun, less-than-orderly, more-than-messy old back deck into a little garden, into a little kiss from God.

I have a brown thumb. I have managed to kill everything from azaleas to zoysia. I can’t grow corn, or turnips, or broccoli, or tomatoes. I can’t even grow mold under my house. I will never have a Better Homes and Gardens home and garden. At my age, I can’t even grow taller. But I don’t worry about the bare spots in my lawn, or the failed tub of mint and catnip by the chiminea.

I think I will leave the honeysuckle vine to grow for a while. I think I will wait until the deck starts to sag, and we have to dive into our savings tearing it down and building a new one. I think that when that happens, I will see if I can plant a new vine by the old compost bin. I don’t need a garden, I need a honeysuckle vine.

I need a little bit of Heaven outside my back door.