A neighbor of ours has a lovely little jasmine bush. I don't know what kind it is, specifically, all I know is that the smell is so familiar and happy-making for me that it's one of my favorite stop-to-smell-the-flowers spots along our street.
When I was serving in the Air Force during OPERATION IRAQI FREEDOM (winter 2003), I was stationed at Prince Sultan Air Base, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Basically, we were plopped down in the middle of the desert. Americans, Brits, and French service members all lived in a guarded, fenced-in area called Coalition Compound. It was sort of like a state penitentiary, but the barbed wire was intended to keep people out, not to keep us in. The desert - at least what I experienced of it - does not offer a great deal of variety in its views, flora or fauna. There was the occasional dust storm, a force to be reckoned with, for certain. There were some palm trees that had clearly been placed there by humans (the irrigation system was a dead giveaway!) and ginormous bugs that you wouldn't believe. But basically I could look in any direction and see the same thing: miles and miles of hot sand. So, at least where I lived and worked, there wasn't a lot of interest for the senses.
Except for one thing: a couple of months into my deployment, after the war had begun and I had resigned myself to the fact that I was going to be in the desert until Uncle Sam was good and ready to let me go home, I noticed that a small bush had blossomed teeny white flowers. I hadn't seen any desert flowers, and I noticed that this scruffy bush's blooms were particularly fragrant at dusk. I remembered flowers like this from when I lived in southern Spain: jasmine! I started to make a habit of walking by the bush every evening on my way to the chow hall for dinner, just so that I could crouch down and sniff these beautiful little white flowers. They smelled so good they could transport me, if only for a moment, to a place other than where I was. They smelled like beauty itself, like peace and happiness and home.
I looked forward to smelling those flowers all day and was so pleased when one clump of flowers became ten or twenty, and I could smell the bush from a couple of feet away. Those blossoms came just in time for me as I was struggling to fend off depression, anger, and many other difficult feelings surrounding my situation. Smelling something so lovely from nature was a powerful reminder of the good things in life, and that I would not - in fact - be stuck in the desert forever.
The paths I walk now are quite different: filled with children and pets and friendly neighbors. There are many wonderful things to see, hear and smell along my walks. Still, I always stop to smell the flowers, to remind myself that we have within our grasp wonderful reminders of good things...it is up to us to take the time to enjoy them.
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