la vie est belle

get ready, I'm being sentimental...

I love summer storms. You can just kinda feel the thunder inside of you, but it's so warm outside. It's so calm, but it also feels like there's a ton of energy in the air. And there is, cause then it lightings, which is especially fun when you're driving and get a clear view of it ripping through the sky in front of you.

So it's like that, but as I get closer to home, the rain lets up a little, and as soon as I turn into my neighborhood, I smell honeysuckle. Smell is the sense most closely related to memory, so it makes me feel carefree like I'm 8 again, running around the backyard barefoot and sweaty, just as it's getting to be dusk, and I'm filling a Mason jar covered in punctured Cling Wrap with as many lightning bugs as I can. Then I drive down my driveway, and when I open the car door, honeysuckle just floods the air. I honestly don't think I've ever smelled it that strong. And now of course, I'm on a mission to go consume as much honeysuckle as I can. So I run down the wet hill to the woods at the edge of my backyard, and the bushes are just covered in honeysuckle. And I stand there and drink honeysuckle in the summer rain. Oooh man.

I swear there was not a single honeysuckle flower a week ago. I was watering the garden, and I thought of honeysuckle, but I didn't see any. So I figured, oh well, I guess we don't get it any more. Ppfff, what was I thinking. Of course it was still there. That's what I love about nature. Sam's old swingset might break and fall down, my mother might give away all the books that I learned to read from, Mandy might have to move to a new house, we might all go to college, and I might lose interest in playing in the creek for hours on end and chewing on onion grass. But every year the honeysuckle comes back, and that intangible feeling of childhood just comes rushing back too. It's like when it starts to smell like summer again, and you realize that you had forgotten what summer smells like. But it's still a part of you enough that you'll always recognize it. Every year, the lightning bugs twinkle by the grass and bushes. Every year, the crickets chirp at night. Violets and daffodils grow by the creek. Blueberries grow on the island in Massachusetts. Snow falls. Leaves turn orange and crinkle when you walk through them. My childhood always comes back.

Bath & Body Works used to have a honeysuckle fragrance. It was my favorite. Then they discontinued it. I went in to get it one time, and it was gone. But not my backyard. My backyard just keeps making the stuff.