Sweetness

You know summer is just around the corner in Mississippi when you are driving down a back road and you smell honeysuckle blooming on the fencerows. If you pick some and put them in water in your house, your entire house will smell like these wonderful things.

There was always a strip of woods around our playgrounds in elementary school that had honeysuckle which is where I perfected the art of drinking the nectar from the blooms. There is a green cap at the bottom of the bloom when you pluck it from the vine and you pinch it very precisely without breaking the stem in the middle of the bloom but keeping it attached to the cap at the end of the flower. Like I said, it’s an art. You sloooooooooooooooooooowly pull the cap/stem away from the bloom and a drop of nectar comes out the end of the flower. You suck that up before it drops to the ground and is wasted. It’s sweeter than 3 tablespoons of sugar and the yellow bloom’s nectar is sweeter than the white ones, FYI.

In Mississippi, we don’t stop to smell the roses. We stop to smell the honeysuckle.