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.

At this Moment…

Every moment we live is a miracle. Every moment we feel, every moment we see, every moment we experience our world is a miracle.

At this moment a life is reaching a conclusion, and someone is discovering whether there is nothing, or everything, beyond the world in which we live.

At this moment a child is opening her eyes for the first time.

At this moment a cow is mooing.

At this moment a tire is losing adherence to a wet road surface.

At this moment a foot is striking a ball.

At this moment old friends are sharing a laugh.

At this moment a snowflake is falling on a hillside.

At this moment a wife is being struck by her husband.

At this moment a prayer is being said.

At this moment sunlight is peeking over the edge of the world.

At this moment a foot’s asleep.

At this moment a breeze is stirring through a lion’s mane.

At this moment a man is snoring.

At this moment a child is losing his innocence.

At this moment a whale is sounding.

At this moment a traffic light is changing.

At this moment a kitten is purring.

At this moment a pilot is flying over Iraq.

At this moment a woman is looking into the eyes of the man she’ll marry.

At this moment a sun is moving into eclipse.

At this moment a farmer is spreading manure.

At this moment a doctor is prescribing a sedative.

At this moment a wave is breaking on a tropical reef.

At this moment billions of people are living from moment to moment to moment totally unaware of the miracles around them. At this moment some of those billions realize that in this one moment we are all alive and the universe is around us. At this moment, just as immensity is about to overwhelm and sanity teeters on the edge of the infinite, a soul is finding its place, and the universe is regaining its balance.

Every moment we live is a miracle. Every moment we feel, every moment we see, every moment we experience our world is a miracle. Every moment we are is a miracle.

And the next moment….

Things I wonder about.

I have a lot of spare time. Well, not really, but I do waste a lot of time wondering about things that have no effect upon my own life, and over which I have no power or authority. For example:

I wonder if there are aliens on a planet in the Greater Magellanic cloud wondering if there are aliens on a planet in Andromeda wondering if there are aliens on a planet here in the Milky Way wondering if there are aliens on Earth. Woo!..I’m a little dizzy.

I wonder where they get the chintzy prizes they put in Cracker Jack boxes.

I wonder if we would have brought the perpetrators of 9/11 to justice any faster if we had engaged in a pursuit of criminals rather than in a “war on terror”.

Just why is Lou Holtz on television?

Are Archer, Daniels and Midland family farmers? And if not, do they get all those government tax breaks and subsidies anyway?

I wonder why I yell at my dog to get out of the trash when I know she can’t understand English.

If Cialis works so well, why is that couple always sitting…outside…in two separate bathtubs…behind an umbrella.

Is “evitable” really the opposite of “inevitable”?

I wonder if I will actually kill the next person I hear asking why we park on a driveway and drive on a parkway. It was funny exactly once.

I wonder if the NBA season will ever go so long that a baby born at the opening of the first game of the season can play power forward at the end of the season. And truly, aren’t ALL balls roundballs? Well, spherical, anyway, but still….

Do they always put the woman on the Fox News morning show directly in front of the camera in a short skirt?

Where are my darn car keys?!?

On an interstate highway, “merge” means “merge”, first one car from the merging lane, then one from the through lane; it doesn’t mean stop! WHY CAN’T YOU GET THAT?!?

Why is Gilbert Gottfried? And no, that’s not a typo.

I wonder what Mark Twain would think of Will Rogers?

Those are the things I wonder about. What do you wonder about?

I wonder if you’ll say….