Dizzy with the perfume of the lilacs, each time I pass a tree or a bush of them, I incline my head and take a great walloping sniff and say AAAAH. I can’t always smell them (thanks, allergies!) but it’s fun to try, and when I DO get a whiff it lasts for a really long time, long after the fact, long after I am gone away from them. It’s the memory of scent and the memory of green and of new and of BURGEONING that gets me through the winters here. All the long dark dreary winter days I cling to the memory of lilacs.
The rapeseed is dimming in the fields, turned down several notches from the electric neon yellow it was last week. Martin’s piano teacher sells honey from bees around here…she has 2 kinds: summer wildflower and rapeseed. We bought a jar of rapeseed honey after Anders and the kids taste-tested them both and declared the rapeseed jar best. It’s a creamy shimmery pale yellow color; in fact, yellow isn’t really the right color adjective to apply to it. It’s thick and opaque, not at all like store-bought honey in a plastic bear; it looks like the creamiest kind of frosting: flower glaze.
I don’t actually care for honey all that much, but it’s sure an amazing thing to look at and think about. Sadly, she and her bee farmer say there won’t likely be any rapeseed honey from the bees this year. Apparently, the rapeseed is 2 weeks too early for them and it will be done blooming before the bees are ready to harvest the pollen and make honey with it. I don’t know anything about the production of honey or the mechanics of the timing, but that makes me sad. Since they need that honey for feeding themselves and their young, it makes me even sadder, though I know that bees generally produce many times more honey than what they actually need. I wonder what the bees will substitute if their rapeseed blossoms are gone when they head out to gather nectar. Dandelions? Queen Anne’s lace? Clover? Lily of the valley?
It’s a full moon tonight. Full moons always seem to last forever around here, especially when it’s clear like it’s been here for several days. That’s another thing I’m storing up right now: the light. When I drove home last night from choir practice it was as light out at 9:30 p.m. as if it were early evening. I can’t get enough of it. I drove from the highway up the exit to Gårdstånga and turned onto the road toward Flyinge. I hadn’t noticed it before then, as it was too low, but as I made the turn, some trick of the hills and the light and the incline suddenly brought me face to face with the moon and he was HUGE and ORANGE like a great big pumpkin in the sky. It was rather comical, actually. The view ahead of me was just like a child’s drawing: all fiercely colored with great big swaths: GREEN fields, BLUE sky, ORANGE moon! Orange moon with a clearly smiling man-in-the-moon face, just like an extraterrestrial jack-o-lantern. I smiled back at him the rest of the way home.