citronella makes me remember the woods, walking down to lakes near sunset when the bugs were thick. tea tree is summers of blisters and bites. the scent of russian olive will only ever be one place. two five four one candelaria.
there are so many places I miss.
it is seven years ago already the summer when I lived near the river in new mexico and we planted tomatoes in the front yard. we planted thyme and oregano and basil too, just inside the tall adobe wall that the cats sauntered across, and we made pizza all summer long. the mimosa tree flowered in july, and its blooms like soft explosions fell onto the bench that j's father called the cloudwatcher.
(that's the kind of place it was. where they made furniture just for watching the sky.)
sometimes I would bicycle to work in the morning, five miles along the river at six a.m. I would make coffee for land suveyors, omelettes for housewives with land rovers and stable hands, and every day I wore the same pair of sneakers. I made friends with the girlfriends of my boyfriend's friends. the boys were away much of the summer, and we ladies spent nights with gossip and tequila in the backyard of the home that I wanted to be mine.
the bosque, the tract of woods along the river, was a tangle of trees torn up by the river's flooding. the soil was packed down hard and it smelled of russian olive there.
the leaves are sage green and slightly dusty. the fruits are small and purplish. the scent is sweet. I have smelled it nowhere else.
I can miss it all very much if I let myself.