The Smell of Roses

   My usual bike route whether to and from the gym, returning from downtown or returning from most locations south and east in town, passes Peninsula Park.  It's one of the city's older parks and the site of Portland's original rose test garden.  This time of year when many of the rose bushes (there are a hundred or so varieties and five or six hundred plants)  are in bloom, the area for a couple of blocks around smells of roses.  It's remarkably pleasant.  The scent isn't the cloying aroma of too much perfume but is light and refreshing.  Each time I pass the park I think of a large rose bush from somewhere in my youth -- Probably the lumber camp where I grew up and where my mother, who loved flowers, devoted much time and energy to her flower garden.  When we three kids got a bit older we went on regular excursions to find and transplant bushes and flowers from the forest to our yard. 
   (The tiger lily photo is from Forest Park.  I don't think our mother would have taken any plants from an actual established park, but anywhere else was fair game.  If they had been outside of a park, those lilies would have been dug up -- using our fingernails if necessary -- before anyone could have said "Aren't those pretty.", and replanted in our yard where they would have been far prettier)
   Another, less pleasant memory, comes with the smell of diesel smoke -- evoking my high-school summers -- which I spent loading hay bales, throwing hay bales, stacking hay bales, chopping (grinding the hay into bits -- cattle and sheep will eat a lower quality of hay when it's ground up) the hay -- all the while being hot, sweaty, covered with hay dust and inhaling diesel fumes -- and commonly surrounded by rutting sheep,  which was very frustrating to a teenage boy who wasn't getting any --   Such fun it was.   Proust had it wrong to my mind.  It isn't the taste of madeleine with tea that brings memories, but the smell of them.

   Dredging up memories reminds me:  for the last few days I've been trying to remember this WWII ditty and today I finally Googled it.
(to the tune of Colonel Bogey's March)

Goring has only got one ball
Hitler has two but very small
Himmler has something similar
And Goebbels has no balls at all

Still reading Mark Twain's Autobiography.  DA