nabil

1.  The back fence in my childhood yard was covered with honeysuckle; by the time I was in college, it was crawling out over the grass and eating the lilac bush.  I spent at least one summer fighting with it, sweating in the Virginia heat while I ripped up vines from the earth, trying to get the roots, untwined vines from the lilac branches, did my damndest to save the struggling plant.  If I dropped the vines on the ground after I pulled them up, they would put down roots and start growing again.

2.  When I moved to the Bay area I desperately missed honeysuckle.  Jasmine is lovely, the backyard of the little house I rented in Berkeley had jasmine planted by the bedroom window, and I loved the heavy sweetness on summer nights.  But the scent lacked delicacy, and you couldn't suck nectar from the blossoms.  The scent, the flavor of summer was missing.  I missed honeysuckle, fireflies, and crickets.

So when I found a single vine on the gate by a school on the route I walked from Bart, I began making detours to that vine, to taste and smell the honeysuckle.  I brought several lovers to that honeysuckle vine, made them smell the flower, taught them how to open it and find the single drop of sweetness.

3.  Wandering in lush green in Hawaii with my exgirlfriend, on the way to visit a famous cave, I smelled something familiar, tantalizing, but somehow different too.  It smelled like honeysuckle, but I didn't see the blossoms anywhere.  Then I found the source:  honeysuckle on the wrong scale, giant blossoms, honeysuckle must have drifted to the island years ago and mutated in isolation.  The huge blossoms diluted the scent, the color; but the nectar was just as sweet.