P.S.: to wurkin'...(edited with pictures!)

I have these two huge tea olive trees planted much too close to the house. That smell so wonderfully fragrantly delightfully yummy, I tell people I am convinced that is what will assault our noses when we get to heaven. (Or maybe magnolia blooms.) These two tiny shrubs, about the diameter of a pencil and maybe thirty inches tall, were purchased in one gallon pots. When we moved into this house, well over thirty years ago, as a gift from my grandmother, and planted behind the house, near bedroom,  so I could open the windows and enjoy the fragrance when they bloom several times each year. Of course now they are  much taller than the peak of the roof, and frequently need trimming. Also probably the cause of long term plumbing problems when we had an alternative method of disposing of waste products. But the thing I wanted to say: is how the smell of the tea olive tree, any place, any time, makes me think of my grandmother.

As I have travelled around south Georgia in recent weeks, and seen wildflowers gloriously blooming out in the woods, along the right-of-way I've seen lots of wisteria. Which makes me think of the amusing cousin who loves it so much she has a hand-sized tattoo inked on her back. No fear: I'm not that crazy about it. It also makes me think of neighbors of my parents when I was a kid, who had several wisteria plants in their yard. I know now how invasive it is, and what a considerable effort it would take to keep that monster under control. The plants, when these sweet people, now deceased, lived next door, were deliberately consistently trimmed to keep the vining shrub maintained in to a small compact plant. I think it has since been neglected to the point that it is in the tree tops.  I am convinced there is a here-to-for undiscovered link between wisteria and kudzu: both are remarkably invasive, thought they surely must have some undiscovered purpose here on the planet, sort of like the lowly peanut George Washington Carver found so many surprising uses for.

Another thing I see when roaming the countryside, flagrantly blooming in the tree tops, has been yellow Carolina jasmine. It too, will climb up anything it can get a toe-hold on. Often seen twining around fence posts, and across into the distance on wire farm fences. Or draping and dangling from high tree limbs. My dad enjoyed traveling country by-ways seeing the bright yellow blooms -- always an early spring bloomer - promising warmer weather, sunshine-y days of spring, new growth in the forests and fields. I don't know whether he grew fond of the Carolina jasmine in his years as a cotton ginner: bringing the knowledge that the rural area where he lived would soon begin the cycle of plowing and planting crops. Or during his years as a mail carried, for several routes around the county where he lived - having the time to drive down dirt roads and obscure little by-ways, putting mail into boxes, visiting with farming men and their home-maker wives. Taking the time to notice the changes as they gradually came with the turning of the clock, and altered rotation of the planet. But I know he loved seeing the yellow blooms, and started looking for them, twining into the uppermost branches of the roadside trees as the pages of the calendar promised Spring.