honeysuckle alley.....

I love to drive with the windows down in my car. I guess the big draw of that is the fact that I'm in an office all day long, and I love the feeling of doing 75 and feeling the fresh air circulate through my car as I'm going down the interstate.

There's one special stretch of road that I look forward to every day during the summer. I've nicknamed it honeysuckle alley. It's about a quarter-mile from the entrance to our neighborhood, and the fragrance of honeysuckle almost instantly overwhelms me. It's sweet, but not too sweet, the kind of scent that brings a smile to one's face.

Whenever I smell honeysuckle, it makes me think of my summers growing up in Kingsport. Most days were spent on my bike, riding around the neighborhood, going from yard to yard and playing with friends. We would spend most of our time in what we called the "clayfield", which was pretty much several acres of undeveloped red clay. We'd ride our bikes on trails. We even had some "sweet jumps" set up in one area. And we'd play baseball in heat that most kids today would call intolerable. Near the clayfield, there were some grapevines we'd swing on that went over a creek. That was where the scent of honeysuckle was the strongest.

That was 25-30 years ago. It's amazing to me that a simple smell can take me back that far.....