Honeysuckle

a honeysuckle
blossom

There was a big honeysuckle bush dividing our backyard from our neighbors in the house in Connecticut where my family lived, from 1985 until my parents finally sold it in 15 years later, a few years into their divorce. It was a long unkempt monster of a bush, growing and spilling over the buried remains of a fence, until it replaced and became the fence, long before our tenure as residents.

As it grows, a honeysuckle bush forms a dense haphazard matrix of leaves and thin spiky branches, like a net of sticks, blooming with small yellow and white flowers. Pretty, but not exactly beautiful or remarkable.

Underneath its impenetrable carapace, a mature honeysuckle bush discards all but the thickest branches, supporting its outward quest for dominance and sun. Nothing grows in the dark caves of its interior spaces. It's former self continually replaced with supportive emptiness.

As a small child, I would spend hours at a time in this hidden place. I brought treasures and books and pictures. It was my own secret cave, where I was the sole explorer. I found and unearthed the old remnants of the fence it had long ago devoured, and without knowing it, formed vivid intense memories of the feel of the old wood and the intricate shapes of the twine wrapped around it, perhaps to support the bush in its infancy, or perhaps in a vain attempt to keep the fence itself from coming apart.

In that place, I was safe, and yet being there had a sense of darkness and foreboding, imbued with the freedom and wild danger of solitude. It was safe; home, but apart from home, and the intensity of a world that I never felt fully a part of. Alone, I could be me, without explanations.

Now I am a man, a partner and a father, and have precious few opportunities to lose myself hidden away in a dark thicket of brambles. My life and self have expanded far beyond that child, leaving pockets of void in many of the spaces he once filled, as the ego expands to live up to the promises it makes itself.

I wouldn't say that honeysuckle is my favorite flower. But the smell of it produces such an overwhelmingly painful and joyful nostalgia that I get dizzy from the emotional impact and have to brace myself so I don't fall over. There's nothing like it.