I love honeysuckles. They are, however, a source of both joy and pain for me.
The fragrance is usually a balm to my soul and if I find a soap in that scent, I will get it.
The beautiful yellow flowers bloomed wild in many places in the woods around the house I grew up in. My grandmother taught me and my sister how to gently break off the ends with a pinch and slowly pull the middle through till we saw the little drop of clear nectar. Licking the nectar off was always the best part and would usually end in my sister and I giggling our way through it.
My grandparents all lived three hours away and one of the things my grandmother liked to do with us when they came to visit was go on walks. We lived on a largely vacant dead-end street with quite a few lots that were nothing but woods. So, we would walk up to the road and just go back and forth while talking.
My grandmother was always teaching me something about nature on those walks and we always turned it into a treasure hunt for fun things. My favorite treasures were always the flowers. We needed flowers with long sturdy stems, and we were always very careful to leave as much of the stem on as we could.
After we got tired of walking, we would find a shady place to sit in the grass and go over all our treasures. The flowers would be placed in a pile, and with my grandmother’s help, they would all be slowly woven into a flower crown which is why keeping as much of the stems as possible was important. Hers always seemed to hold its shape and mine was always struggling. But she would take it and work her magic and mine would come together and hold its shape for a little longer.
She has always been a wonderful storyteller and would tell all about how she learned these things and about what she did as a child. It seemed beyond comprehension at the time that my grandmother could have ever been young enough to talk about getting into the mischief that children could get into and the consequences that would follow. It was, however, so fascinating to listen to.
She had grown up on a nursery that her family had owned and run and so she knew quite a lot about plants and flowers. My favorite of all the flowers she would talk about was the honeysuckles. We would gather as many as we could carry (with all our other treasures of course) and put them in a separate pile than all the other flowers. They were not for our flower crowns. They were for licking the nectar.
Due to health issues, my grandparents eventually stopped driving down to visit. We would go see them, but my grandmother could no longer physically handle the drive.
Going on walks wasn’t ever as much fun without her, so I stopped going.
It really didn’t matter anyway because I never had time.
I was too busy taking care of the house and my younger siblings and trying to survive abusive parents. I eventually escaped my parents’ house, got married, had children, and continued on with life. Life sent my husband and I a few hard curveballs and dealing with childhood got pushed to the back burner.
We bought our first home just a few months before our third child was born. It was on the end of a cul-de-sack and backed up against woods and a creek. There was a fishing pond really close as well and unfortunately that meant that we had tons of mosquitoes. If there is a mosquito present, I will get bit—as will my oldest child—so we really didn’t go outside much.
One particular day, the kids were being crazy, and I just needed a few minutes of quiet. I stepped outside and walked to the side of the house intending just to go out for a minute, but a scent coming up from the line of trees stopped me.
Honeysuckles. It was so strong and seemed to suddenly come out of nowhere.
I started walking towards the trees, surprised, as I had no clue till that moment that there were any honeysuckles growing back there. I reached up, smiling, and pulled the branch down and picked a few off.
For a moment, I thought of the walks with my grandmother, but as I broke the end off the second honeysuckle something changed. I was no longer an adult remembering sweet walks with someone I loved. I was a teenager again, standing in the woods behind my parents’ house.
Hungry. So hungry.
Knowing that I still had so many chores to do and so many school assignments to complete but with no energy to do them. Not remembering when I had last been allowed to eat and desperately trying to find something to give myself even a little energy and stop the horrible gnawing hunger that was just always there. I was no longer getting the nectar for the enjoyment of it; I was getting it in a desperate attempt to continue to function.
I have no idea how long I stood there like that before the flashback broke. But when it did, I felt a panic settling in.
I had to get out.
Like trying to pull my feet out of tar, I yanked them up and fled as quickly as I could back into the house. Somehow I made it through taking care of my children for the rest of the day until my husband got home. I didn’t really even know how to process what had just happened.
The panic slowly and eventually turned into anger. Anger that one of the few things that were associated with good memories to me had suddenly turned into one associated with trauma. It took a long time to recover from that. For weeks I couldn’t even use my honeysuckle soap that I loved.
It’s been a few years from that moment now. I’m back to a place where I can use my soap or smell actual honeysuckles and the memories with my grandmother are the memories that come, and I hope it stays that way. I am blessed to still have my grandmother with me, but I know that I will not have her forever and the memories with her are the ones I want to always have and focus on.
Erika
is a survivor of childhood abuse.
She is now married with five children and is working through her journey of healing on her blog Sewing Is Therapy.