Memories

It is raining here which is code for flooding in low lying areas. Mostly it creates nothing but transportation hassles. Mind you if they opened the dam before it started to flood... statistically the weather forecasters have to be right once in a while surely... it might have saved them from having to run it off during the onslaught and flood one of the only two access roads to work. A decision which resulted in a pleasant two hour bus trip to work this morning and an hour and a half home L

There is a small upside to all this rain. On the way to the bus stop one has to pass a place where the home owners thoughtlessly planted some of the smaller members of the Cypress family. Thoughtlessly because although not a native to this climate, if they survive, they will happily expand outwards at an impressive rate... right over the foot path in this case. The only reason one hasn't mentioned them to the council is that when it rains the air is redolent with the smell of Cypress and that smell takes one back to childhood.

In that brief moment of inhalation the present recedes and one is a child again. As a child growing up in a cooler climate they were common place. The property one grew up on was bordered with a member of the Cypress family... enormous Macrocarpas that were close on to 60 feet tall. Every time there was a storm pass through you would find auntie peering at them anxiously. She always expected them to come down in the next big storm. But then auntie had a flair for the dramatic and the histrionic.

The first time one ever brought home tadpoles resulted in her standing on a chair shrieking. And frankly her explanation, that her mother had been scared by a frog while carrying her, did little to dispel one's belief that she was utterly illogical. It did however, give a small child the ultimate weapon... and a frog was quietly produced from a pocket on more than one occasion. In one's defence what child isn't going to try and replicate sending an adult up on a chair shrieking?

This does however digress from the trees...

It was in some of those trees that uncle started to build one a most fabulous tree house... he was very handy... and it was always something of a disappointment that it was never completed. It wasn't until a visit home a few years later that one realised why. The bloody tree house was close on to 20 feet in the air, with a downward slope on one side of it. Auntie had most probably come out to the orchid to see what uncle was up to and had a fit.

While she might have been prone to illogical flights of fancy, she was logical enough to work out that the tree house was a serious injury waiting to happen J

See all of these silly memories evoked by a simple smell and the only price is having to walk on the grass for a minute. Besides Cypress don't like being hard pruned that much. They are just as likely to die back in retaliation and then one of the last tenuous threads to childhood will be severed. Far better to keep quiet and inhale...