Flowers in October

I’ve been smelling it for over a week now. I took a trip out to my car to get a phone charger the other day and I found myself slowing my pace just so that I could spend more time breathing in the scent. And I couldn’t figure out what it was.

October’s been glorious in Charlotte. I’ve put in a request to God that it be October in Charlotte all the time. I was beginning to think that the scent was just the smell of October.

Until last Thursday. I pulled into my typical parking spot and turned off the car, waiting a moment to hear the tail end of the news story that was playing before I opened the door. Listening, I gazed out the windshield before me and noticed small, white flowers on a branch of the holly bush directly in front of me.

That entire side of the parking lot is a holly hedge, a barrier between our property and the park next door. It runs the entire length of the property—I’ve never seen that much holly in one place.

So even if I did know that it bloomed (which, well, makes sense, since it has berries), and bloomed in the autumn (which also makes sense, since the berries show in the winter), I don’t know that I’ve ever been near enough of it at once to smell the blossoms.

The scent is light, airy—sweet, but not syrupy. It’s the bright floral of a jasmine flower or a lily of the valley, not the heavy floral of a plumeria.

And in the scent I’m taken back to the streets of Manila with children knocking at our car windows every time we stopped at a light to try and sell us chains of dried sampaguita to hang on our rearview mirror. I’m standing by the side of my parents’ home in Michigan on a May day, drinking in the lily of the valley, picking them to take inside to put in a vase, and thinking that the only thing wrong with lily of the valley is the fact that they don’t bloom a few weeks later to coincide with the early roses.

I can’t walk down a detergent aisle without sneezing and I’ve taken to washing my clothes with fragrance free detergent because I can’t get them on without a fit of coughing otherwise, but God made a few floral scents I can enjoy, and I shall walk slowly through the parking lot every day until the blossoms are gone from the holly hedge. And when they are, I’ll remember them fondly, waiting for next October to see them again.