Our walks often take us past this meadow behind the apartment complex.  It is possibly a wetland preserve.  I don’t know.  For whatever reason, it is undisturbed.  Today we paused to listen to the bird chorus.

Further along, we came upon this tree in bloom.  I’ve always called them “feather duster trees,” lacking the proper name.  Some have tan, dirty-looking flowers, but this one was glorious pink.

The wild grape vines are flourishing this summer.  One vine was waving in the air, seeking to grab hold of something, only there was no purchase nearby.

We were delighted to find some ripe wild black cap berries.  There’s nothing like the sweet-tart taste of a berry right off the bush.

The last pleasurable surprise was a baby mantis, rescued from a basin with slick sides.

Before COVID-19, we would never be out walking on a weekday morning. Thus are the strange yet lovely joys emerging from social isolation.

Note: apologies to readers–some posts are missing photos.  I mistakenly thought I was cleaning up my media library and later realized my good intentions removed the same photos from the posts as well.  I don’t know how to reinstate them.  Sorry.

This maidenhair fern is flourishing in our apartment.  It’s a first for me, having success with a fern.  But all of our houseplants are happy. The light is diffused by the curtains and it shines all day through the glass doors of the dining area.

Whenever I water my plants, I’m reminded of my brief employment as a worker in a commercial greenhouse in Santa Barbara.  It’s amazing that the manager even hired me, because all the other workers there were Latinos.  He assigned me to the Boston ferns.

The greenhouse itself was huge.  The ferns were propagated on one end.  At the other end were the more delicate tropical plants, like African violets.  Massive fans at either end cooled the building.  Despite the constant wind, the greenhouse was hot and humid.

Only women worked in the ferns.  We moved among long  raised boxes of soil with racks of hanging ferns overhead.  The process, as I remember it, was to remove baby ferns from the mature hanging plants and put them in the beds below.  When the babies grew large enough, we transferred them to small plastic pots.  Eventually, those ferns were ready to be put into a hanging pot.

I liked working with the ferns.  It was often quiet, although Spanish erupted and flew around in bursts.  The women were cheery and kind.  They taught me what to do.  I learned their names, but not much else.  Today, were I in the same job, I would have asked more questions and learned more Spanish.   At that time, I was in my twenties and the boundaries of my world were more self-involved and limited.

After a few weeks, we were joined by another white woman.  She had a couple of kids and was struggling to provide for them.  Cindy had a wry sense of humor.  She kept me entertained.  I enjoyed working with her until she started pushing her religion on me.  Cindy was Christian.  She seemed to feel it was her duty to convert me.  Things weren’t so amusing after that.

One afternoon, an official-looking van parked outside the greenhouse.  Two of the male workers were taken away by the I.N.S.  The women huddled together and whispered. I didn’t know much about illegal immigrants.  The event confused me more than anything else.  Of course, the majority of the greenhouse workers were probably illegal.

A couple of months into the job, the other workers and I began to suffer from sore throats and headaches.  It wasn’t difficult to connect these symptoms to the pesticides being sprayed at the other end of the greenhouse.

I complained to the manager.  “The chemicals are making us sick.  Can’t you spray after hours?”

“You only smell the additives they put in.  It’s not harmful,” he answered.

But I could see the skull and crossbones and read the instructions on the bottles.  I could see the special masks worn by the men who sprayed the plants.

A couple of days later, I was “let go.”

If you’re close to my age, the scent of patchouli oil is likely to evoke memories of dark, stuffy dorm rooms, tie-dyed clothing or marijuana highs. Although I wasn’t deeply into that sixties scene, I do like the fragrance of patchouli. So does my much younger daughter-in-law. My best friend from college years hates it. These days, I prefer to use the oil in my diffuser, along with geranium and sweet orange.

The nose and the brain work together to detect smells. Olfaction, the sense of smell, is the process of detecting and processing chemicals present in the air. When these chemicals enter the nose, the olfactory system takes over to process them. Sometimes a fragrance may be enjoyable, such as perfume or the smell of cookies baking in the oven. The olfactory system also processes undesirable scents in conjunction with the brain.   The sense of smell is the only one of the five senses that delivers immediate responses with instantaneous recognition and response.

                                                                                    —         http://www.fragrancex.com

Another scent that I enjoy is chlorine. The only explanation I can find is that it connects with my childhood and the swimming pool we had in Los Angeles. I practically lived in that pool as soon as the weather permitted. My father was in charge of pool maintenance. We had a filter system with three huge tanks that he monitored, regularly releasing the chlorine gas from a valve on the top. So, today I like the smell of bleach.

As a kid, I liked the smell of gasoline. That carried over to sniffing the top of my father’s cigarette lighter. These days I find those odors repugnant, as well as the smoke of cigarettes and cigars, even though I grew up smelling all of them.

The odor of coffee is another favorite of mine, as I imagine it is for many people. I don’t drink coffee, but the smell evokes pleasant childhood memories of early mornings in California, with my mother seated at the dining room table, a steaming cup in front of her.

Two smells I don’t like are vanilla and coconut, but only in cosmetics. I love foods with coconut in them, and I enjoy the flavor of vanilla in ice cream and cake. I can detect both odors in lotions and shampoos, and they make me recoil. I have no explanation for that.

As the brain processes scents, it accesses connections between specific smells and memories. This is why a scent can conjure up a memory of an event, place, time, or person. The limbic system sits in the center of the brain, and it has a direct connection with the central nervous system.

                                                                                                — www.fragrancex.com

I have a particularly sensitive sense of smell. Sometimes I find myself in a place where the odor of a person or air freshener or food makes it almost impossible for me to stay put. I can even tell when someone has not showered before dressing in the morning. There’s a certain bed odor that clings to the body.

In humans, about 300 active olfactory receptor genes are devoted to detecting thousands of different fragrance molecules through a large family of olfactory receptors of a diverse protein sequence. The sense of smell plays an important role in the physiological effects of mood, stress, and working capacity.

                                                                                                — www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

What odors do you love? What memories do they evoke?