Honeysuckle

The Memory of Scent

There was an old, abandoned ticket booth located at the third turn of the four-hundred-and-forty-yard fast as lightning, crushed-red-brick track. The booth was long past any usefulness, yet no one had bothered to tear it down. It had become overgrown with vines. This tiny building, hardly large enough for one person, was covered with kudzu, poison ivy, and honeysuckle. As I sprinted through the third turn anchoring the four-forty and eight-eighty relays, I often caught a whiff of that honeysuckle. It always boosted me a bit, and helped me catch my second wind. God knows I needed it.

It’s a spring thing, and I often wonder if Hernando De Soto and his accompanying conquistadors encountered walls of honeysuckle as they cut their way through the American South in their futile search for El Dorado.

Once, driving from northern Virginia to southern Florida, we stopped in Georgetown, South Carolina. It was dusk when we exited Interstate 95 looking for a famous restaurant we had been told not to miss. My wife, daughter, and I drove past a cemetery all aglow with solar powered votive lights that cast an eerie illumination at graveside level.

We stopped to further inspect. I recognized a familiar scent, and saw bees buzzing around a wall of vines abloom with a ubiquitous yellow flower. It was the rich nectar of honeysuckle that delivered such a fragrance, so familiar and evocative. I was able to snatch a few of the flowers without getting stung, and shared them with my four-year-old daughter. I showed her how to suck the sweetness from the flower before the bees could get to it. She has always remembered that moment, and thanked me for it.

Now, every time I catch a whiff of honeysuckle I know it is spring, and that wherever it grows children are sucking the sweetness from nature. Also, that I should have run faster, and that there are lights in the cemetery in Georgetown.

I love the scent of honeysuckle in the morning. It smells like the, … SOUTH.

William Dunlap

Flamingos in the Flatland, polymer paint on canvas, 24”x72”