more smelly flowers

tonight a light breeze is carrying the neighborhood night-blooming jasmine in through my open balcony door, and it is blending with the peaches and nectarines ripening on the counter in the kitchen. i love good smells. tiffany keeps showing up at the gallery with gardenias in her hair. i think of all the flowers, gardenias are my favorite smelling ones. about seven or eight years ago, i resuscitated a gardenia bush that had gotten (i thought) killed by a brutal late summer los angeles heatwave. i kept watering it and it came back from the dead. then around the time my dad’s cancer became recurrent, the gardenia started fading, and they both died around the same time. in that 2 or 3 years of extra life the gardenia had after its near-death experience, it was the sweetest and strongest smelling gardenia i have ever smelled, (and i stop to smell pretty much every flowering plant i come across). it’s interesting, before the plant nearly died, it smelled pretty good, but not like after it got a second chance.