I got into my van the other day, and thought, "What is that smell?". It was sweet, mild, and a little earthy. Strangely, it smelt like there was a cantaloupe in my car.
Not until I reached my destination did I realize that there was a cantaloupe in my trunk. In my mad dash to bring in the groceries the previous day (Oliver was standing at the door screaming during the unloading), I had left it there, planning to come back for it later.
The smell of that warm cantaloupe was enough to flood my head with memories. That odor, for my family, is the smell of summer. My father was a high school teacher while I was growing up. When I was young his "summer vacation" was spent packing cantaloupes, grown in the irrigated green fields surrounding Blythe, into boxes. Coming home after a long day of work, his work gloves, with fingers made of old bicycle tubes, would be placed on the kitchen counter alongside the melons he brought home - cantaloupes and occasionally honeydew that were perfectly ripe (too ripe to be packed and shipped).
So summer meant fresh melons for breakfast every morning when you woke up from your sweaty sleep. Summer meant bringing fruit salad to potlucks at the church farm pool, swimming with the sun sinking over the vast desert. It meant cantaloupe milkshakes when Mom went away for Girl's Camp.
Along with that, summer meant driving home under a starry starry sky after a long day on the Colorado -the air musky with river water and sweet with alfalfa, your skin sunburned and your head sandy.
It meant sprinklers under the hot black mat of the trampoline, and trying to sleep outside but coming in because it was still 90 degrees after the sun went down.
Blythe is summer. It lasts for almost half of each year, from May through October.
Blythe is my childhood. From 18 months 'til 18 years.
How did that land shape me? I wonder that often.
Raising our children in Blythe has never been an option (or even a wish), but it still makes my heart ache a little to know that something that had such an influence on my life will leave no trace on theirs -especially since my parents just moved from there to here. I can't even imagine a visit back there.
I look around myself here in Charlotte, and force myself to remember that this land is the land that will be shaping my children and their childhoods. It is baffling to me that this tree-packed city with winding, claustrophobic roads will be their "norm." Greenery, growth everywhere, without canals providing water, and water so plentiful, even in times of drought. Months of rain each year instead of four of five days!
Will they appreciate trees if they grow up surrounded by them, locked in by them on all sides?
Will they still marvel at flowers that grow so easily?
Will the giggle every time they get to use an umbrella?
Someday, will they travel to Blythe and feel overwhelmed by the vast nothingness of the land and the way the sky goes on and on?
And will that open desert sky ever stop feeling like "home" to my senses?
