The Secret Lives Of Flowers

I was about five minutes into my walk this morning, when I smelled them. It seemed strange that they would be here outside of Southern California, a smell that I thought I had left behind with the omnipresent eucalyptus. But oh yes, there they are by the church there, the shrub with little white flowers that smell of queasiness. I don’t know the real name of the plant or flowers, but I used to call them the Nervous Flowers.

You see, outside of the house of my high school girlfriend there grew a bush of Nervous Flowers. The evening that they got that name was when I arrived to take her to prom. I rang the doorbell and waited for her mother, or her Marine Corps father, to let me inside the house I had never been in. My heart was pumping adrenaline out of my pores so hard, practically all I could hear was the pumping, the rest of the world taking on a muffled sound as if after a concert. I felt as though there were a real threat of vomiting right there. I could barely breathe, and what little breath came in was coated with the sharp smell of those little, white flowers.

The connection was so strong, that for years following that night, anytime I stood at the threshold of the door I would smell those flowers and immediately begin to feel a little loose in the stomach. Over this time the flowers began to smell like other things to me. They smelled of defeat, of resignation, of youthful idealism, but mostly they just smelled of nervousness.

It reminded me of something that Bif had said when we were almost to Mandy and Jason’s the other day. She pointed out the smell of some phantom flower on the air and asked if I knew what sort of tree or bush it came from. I said I didn’t, and she stated that it, “smells like sex.”

She’s absolutely right, and it is something I’ve noticed before but perhaps out of some sort of puritan bashfulness, I never put it in those words. There is this slight semen smell to them, this sort of flat and mushroomy smell, but more than that there lingers this sex funk that tangs up the air. It’s not a necessarily great smell, but that could just be that you yourself are not manufacturing it, that you don’t expect to encounter it outside of wherever it is you tend to get freaky. I imagine people of delicate constitutions being made very uncomfortable when this flower blooms.

Yesterday, we went for a short hike through the arboretum in Washington Park. It was a fantastic, bright and warm day, and it felt great to be roaming along trails in the midst of all of this greenery, itself in the midst of a city. I had Riley strapped to me and he seemed to be enjoying himself where all you could see were the woods. I was pointing out to him the dandelions and the daisies and the buttercups knowing full well that he didn’t know what the hell I was talking about, but hoping that down the road he would have the reinforcement of a great day filled with laughter when he was out among the trees.