tea olive

To my mind, one of the most delicious odors encountered in the Lowcountry is tea olive, which blooms both in the spring and autumn. Whenever I run across its fragrance, though, I turn melancholy. Even as a child before all this dying started, I’d associate tea olive – my Mama called it sweet olive – with ephemera, maybe because the smell of tea olive is fleeting, unlike, say, a gardenia, which you can practically huff and get high on.

It’s that time of year, the light a little richer, a bit more golden, “the maturing sun” Keats calls it in that amazing poem of his, where “barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day.”

Well, today there is at last a hint of autumn in the air. It seems as if in these latter days of the empire, summer has encroached upon both spring and autumn, swiping a bit from both, and, of course, down here on the coast we don’t get any of the brilliant colors we associate with fall, no bright yellow or orange or red leaves strewing the brooks. Come to think of it, speaking strictly, I don’t know if we have brooks down here. At least I’m pretty sure I’ve never run across a “babbling brook.”

Speaking of babbling, I ain’t got nothing to say except, “Hello, autumn. How about hanging out for at least a couple of days?

That and to lay a little Keats on you:

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,

Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;

Conspiring with him how to load and bless

With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;

To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,

And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;

To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells

With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,

And still more, later flowers for the bees,

Until they think warm days will never cease,

For summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.

 

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?

Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find

Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,

Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;

Or on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep,

Drows’d with the fume of poppies, while thy hook

Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:

And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep

Steady thy laden head across a brook;

Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,

Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.

 

Where are the songs of spring? Ay, Where are they?

Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—

While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,

And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;

Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn

Among the river sallows, borne aloft

Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;

And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;

Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft

The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;

And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

Judy Birdsong in Autumn