Fragrant Flower: The Scent of Summer

Once again it is summer time. The schools are closed and the birds are chirping. People's spirit and the outside temperature are both rising. The smell of fresh cut grass lingers throughout the day, while the moonlight is accompanied by the hues of fireflies. 

As I woke up today in my sister's home, a scent transported me to a place almost 14,000 kilometers away. A hamlet nesting around the green luscious paddy fields and the mighty tall palm trees; my ancestral home in the village of Mathur, Kerala. 

During my childhood, summer breaks meant saying goodbye to our home in the city and welcoming our few months stay at our paternal ancestral home. Those days were spent running around and swimming in the pond with my cousins. We ventured out into the paddy fields in the evening hours, trying to spot wild peacocks. I still remember how we always hoped to find them shaking and displaying their whole array of tail feathers as part of their courtship dance. 

One particular scent that defined the dog days of those summers for me was the fragrance of jasmine blossom. There were wild jasmine plants in our yard, which despite human neglect, always thrived and flourished. Jasmine flowers often bloom in the early hours of the morning and shed these blossoms soon after dawn. 


Those days, I wasn't woken up by the alarm clock in my bedroom or by my grandmother's voice telling me to get up and get ready for school. No, instead it was the sweet fragrance of jasmine blossom that woke me up like a gentle breeze. I would then run to the yard to see my elder cousins  picking up the fallen flowers from the ground and already making jasmine garlands to wear on their heads.

Almost two decades have passed and in the meantime, my family moved across the world, I graduated from college, and all my siblings and cousins have started their own family, with most having children of their own. Times have changed and all those days feel like distant memory now. And yet all it took were a few blossoms blooming in my sister's jasmine plant in America to transport me back to a memory from decades ago, across the world in Kerala, India. 

Jasmine blossoms, the smell of my childhood; the scent of my summers. 

-Rithin Moideen Kutty

June 22, 2024  

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