Emotional memories love to piggyback onto smells. Aromateurs have a saying, “Do not linger in the garden of memories, for there are many traps.”
“I did that with my mom’s lemon bars once. But that was only a month ago.” He flashes me a grin, rousing one out of me. Then, with a mischievous quirk of his eyebrow, he tucks the flower behind his ear. “If I wear this all day, maybe you won’t feel so bad next time you smell it.”
His goofy gesture melts me like cocoa butter in the sun. Even my bones feel gooey and I pour myself, rather than walk, down the grassy pathway.
The sound of children laughing and yelling intensifies as we draw closer to the Ancients. A Frisbee whizzes one way, while a soccer ball flies in another direction. There must be at least fifty kids in the Children’s Garden today, smelling like grubby hands and sock lint. Many of them are wandering from the grassy field into the Ancients. I pause by a statue of a half-naked woman and survey the under-five-foot crowd. Court shoots me a quizzical glance.
“Maybe they’ll leave soon,” I say, scratching my elbows.
He bends close to my ear. “How many more plants do you need?”
“Twenty-five.”
“Are they all in the Ancients?”
“I hope so.”
Below an engraved wooden sign that reads, “Ancient Plant Garden, Welcome to the Past,” a group of eight-or nine-year-old boys cluster around a rare hellebore shrub, watching a kid in a Camp Snoopy T-shirt pluck off the delicate pink sepals. Children are often attracted to hellebores because of their primitive glands containing sugar that give off a taffy-like note.
I drift closer and sniff. “That one’s a match for one of your mom’s heart notes,” I tell Court.
Out of nowhere, a soccer ball careens toward us like a meteorite. I gasp as something gray streaks past me.
Court traps the ball with his chest, letting it thump down against his thigh, then roll to his foot. Behind him, the hellebores remain unscathed, save for a few missing petals.
The kids who kicked the ball come running in from the grassy field, screaming with delight.
Court looks at me for a moment, the coneflower still impossibly hanging on behind his ear. I freeze the image in my mind so I can remember it forever. Then he snaps his fingers toward the kids in the Ancients. “Hey, you guys want to play some ball?”
The kids bounce. A smile flickers over Court’s lips as he takes a last look at me. “Girls against boys. Let’s go!” He lets the ball drop, then kicks it long.
All the kids run after it, screaming loud enough to reach the soil engineers. Genius. With grim determination, I venture deeper into the now empty Ancient Garden. Most plants known from the fossil record—older than ten thousand years—are extinct, but the ones that survived evolved to form new species and adaptations. The scents envelope me with their low-frequency vibrations, which resonate in the nose far longer than other scents. They’re like Gregorian chants to the ear; the older the species, the more complex their scents. It’s the same way with people.
My heart still pounds, and my mind is a nest of randomly firing neurons. I hate working under pressure, but I have to get this done.
I run my nose through purple horsetail and ferns as ticklish as peacock feathers, hearing Mother’s voice in my head. Always inhale deeply in the presence of an Ancient; they’ve been around the longest and have many secrets to reveal.
Using my hand spade and clippers, I quickly harvest what I need, being careful not to bruise anything or snip more than I absolutely need. Sometimes I have to take parts of the roots, which pains me because a root is harder for the plant to regenerate than a leaf or a flower. As I tug at the base of an exotic fern, I swear to sign up for the volunteer program to make amends.
There. Only one left from this place, Alice’s miso heart note, the problem one. I picked through every one of the Ancients and it’s not here. Still crouching, I swab my forehead with the grass-stained hem of my dress.
“I saw you!” cries a kid. I nearly fall over, too deep in my own thoughts to smell him coming. The kid with the Camp Snoopy T-shirt, sweaty brown hair matted to his head, points a finger at me. “Touch with your eyes, not with your hands.”
Well, isn’t that the corpse flower telling the skunk cabbage it stinks?
I put my fingers over my lips and try to shush him but he’s already sounding the alarm. “Ms. Jackson! There’s a girl cutting plants!”
In a mild panic now, I consider standing my ground. If only I weren’t clutching this heavy bag of damning evidence. With a groan, I step off the horseshoe path and let the ferns close up behind me. A branch knocks my beret off my head as I rush toward a wooded area, and I waste precious seconds stopping to snatch it back up.