I love CA

There are so many things I love about the place I live. Among them are the wildflowers and scents of spring. You haven't lived until you've ridden on a motorcycle through cooling fields of strawberries after dusk. They give off a smell that is sweet and delicious, with undertones of dark, rich earth. The air swirls in eddies of different temperatures. You can feel the cool air from the coast mixing with the heat rising from the asphalt. The air is tinged with the scent of pink star jasmine and orange blossoms.

I wonder if my children will know the scents of Orange County, or if concrete and glass will replace fields of strawberries, as they did the fields of oranges. I remember driving down Irvine Blvd. in the summer time and smelling the sharp smell of ripe citrus fruit in the sun and the acrid smell of rotting oranges in the shade of the trees. Now, driving down this same street, the only orange trees left are a novelty. In springtime the sweet and yet citrusy floral scent of their blossoms precedes the fruit that no one will pick, no one will eat.

The fields of strawberries and nurseries of blooming jasmine might be walled in and smothered by parking lot and cinder block. Will I still remember the way they smelled? The difference between spring, summer, and fall? The way the eucalyptus trees bordered the fields and scented the warm, middle-of-day air?

Will anyone remember?