Love is never wasted, for its value does not rest on reciprocity. — C.S. Lewis
Saturday I spent a couple of hours at the community garden pruning the tomatoes, tying up long limbs, and re-stringing some cordons that snapped in Friday’s storm. Thankfully our plants — about 50 of ‘em — came through relatively unscathed. And while my hands were stained a turquoise almost metallic green from the resinous tomato foliage and I enjoyed a veritable bath of the deeply herbaceous, earthen fragrance that can only be tomato season.
We live in our senses. Some people have songs of summer. I tend to focus on scent. Given my experience tending tomatoes at the community garden, my scent of summer is definitely tomato foliage with a bonus flavor of ripe peach, the kind that you have to bend over to eat so the juices don’t run down your chest. What song/scent/flavor signifies summer for you?
My scents of summer (from my childhood) are sweet peas and honeysuckle!
Scents of summer come in waves. I am lucky enough to have a large field behind my house. I love that scent in the early morning when I am feeding the birds and changing their water. And then again, later in the season when the sun is on the grass. That open-field scent takes me to days of riding horses and being free for the day to go where ever I wanted with a packed lunch and a few carrots for my sweet horse Brownie, who also had a sweet scent of her own.