Smell the roses

It's easy to get carried away with the demands and tasks of every day living and forget to "smell the roses." Today I smelled the proverbial roses in an orchard.

I was walking between two rows of peaches in my dad's orchard, when, like in Saturday morning cartoons, the floating fragrance of the peaches (many of which were over a pound each) crept under my nose, and, like a cartoon character’s, my feet lifted off the ground to turn in the direction of the softball-size peaches. It was bliss. I was floating on air. Of course, the ecstasy ended abruptly when Sage, my 3-year-old, stepped in a thin ditch where the old water pipes had been and got stuck. Screaming ensued. Time out from the peaches.

My peach-sniffing experience was sort of the opposite of the classic rebuke to ‘get one’s head out of the clouds’. The hands-on demands of motherhood leave little time for getting my head in the clouds. If only peaches were in season year round. The scent and taste of peaches from Grandpa Wilson’s orchard are really a little piece of heaven.

Is it blasphemous to say it was a religious experience? I think not. [Alma 30:44]

(Thanks for the pictures, Kelly)

Other “roses” to stop and “smell”:

From nature:

• Freshly cut grass on a summer morning
• Sunsets (especially over the mountains or lake)
• Huge flowerbeds of petunias outside the BYU Library (especially at nighttime)
• Crickets in the backyard at night
• Stars

Man-made:

• Fireworks (or watching little kids do sparklers)
• A marching band performance
• A ballroom dance performance
• Performing with a good musical group
• Finishing a good book
• Arriving (on purpose) to a church meeting early and getting to sit and think
• Writing something creative that’s not required
• Making bread
• Pruning something that really needed it