Years pass and we often fail to note just when it is that the smell of orange blossoms punctuates the air. The aromatic beauty far exceeds the appearance of the flowers that are often difficult to see when passing through a neighborhood, or maybe the scent is so intoxicating that with senses swirling, we simply can’t find the focus to identify where the smell is wafting in from. This is that week where, at least this year, the orange blossoms are making themselves known.

From walking in fields of lavender to strolling through rose gardens, nothing in the realm of fragrances has quite the same impact on us as this incredible sweet scent. Maybe if we lived among the sperm whales and could collect their discarded ambergris, we’d consider that to be the most amazing of bouquets within the environment we were living in, but being relegated to two-legged land-based creatures, I believe Caroline and I are mostly in agreement that orange blossoms rule the world of smells from our perspective. Okay, she did try to say the petrichor and creosote aroma that arises with Arizona’s summer rains might be equal in pleasure to orange blossoms, but I’m sticking with these citrus blooms as being one of the greatest olfactory stimulations that grace my senses every spring.

Missing from this blog entry is just what this smell is like, but I’ve never really figured out a viable language for conveying the various scents that would allow someone else to understand the aroma I was describing. Of course, if the fragrance I was attempting to encapsulate linguistically only required me to compare something to something else, such as we do with wine where we describe woodsy cinnamon notes with chocolatey overtones and a hint of citrus, maybe that would make this easier but orange blossoms are in a universe of perfection that is beyond simple comparisons.