The scent of summer

We didn’t have air conditioning when I grew up in Los Angeles County. It was around, but our house didn’t have it. My mother would close all the windows during the summer days, and as long as you stayed downstairs it was relatively cool. Then we’d open the windows in the evening; temps fall off at night in California, not like here in the District They Call Columbia, so it was comfortable.

One of my most evocative memories of those summer nights is the scent of gardenia wafting up from the bushes in the back yard to my bedroom. So when I moved into my house in the People’s Republic, I got a gardenia bush, which I take inside in the winter and then put on the patio for spring through fall.

To tell you the truth, having to use AC here kind of vitiates that whole olfactory experience, but a couple of weeks ago I noticed the bush had sprung blooms, so I went out to take some pix.

It’s doing better than the dwarf lemon tree that hasn’t produced one single lemon in the two years I’ve had it. (In fact, it may be dying.) That’s very disappointing, because we also had a lemon tree in the back yard, and I never bought a lemon until I’d moved away from home and was appalled by how much they cost.

I’m probably going to have to replace the lemon tree, but I am glad the gardenia’s doing its bit.