Ode to Odors

Every year around this time I give in to my nose at the farmers market and take home an enormous armful of some good-smelling plant or bush.  Last year it was lilacs:

Yep, that's Caddyshack in the background.  It was a good afternoon.

We somehow missed the lilacs this year so this weekend I compensated with an enormous bouquet of mock orange blooms.  They're pretty simple-looking flowers, but they smell a lot like honeysuckle and the bunch was so enormous that it practically functioned as a parasol as I was walking through the market.  When we got the bouquet home and into water, it looked like we planted a bush in the middle of our apartment:

This is an awful picture.  iPhone & apartment-cleaning fail.

The flowers were also a good excuse to play around with our new camera:

I am still getting the hang of this whole "focusing" thing.

But!  The plot thickens.  After I brought home my lovely mock orange branches (which, by the way, are you supposed to just lop off huge amounts of branches of a bush/tree just for the flowers?  This makes me feel kind of bad), my infinitely resourceful future husband chose the same afternoon to pickle ramps in our kitchen approx. 5 feet away.  I don't usually mind the acrid smell of vinegar wafting through our small apartment, but this aggression against my fragile dewy blossoms would not stand!  E has a notoriously awful sense of smell, so he didn't have any problem with the situation, plus he had just cleaned the kitchen a bit so I couldn't be too annoyed with him.  Instead, I took a nap, and then a shower, because these are good things to do when one is annoyed for a petty reason, and then I cleaned all the pickling stuff and opened all the windows. And all was well.

In retrospect, I was going to spin this as a victory on my part but I think all I succeeded in doing was being pouty for an hour or so and then solving the problem myself in under 15 mins.  Which is kind of a victory, I guess?  Anyway, the vinegar smell is long gone.  The blossoms still smell delicious and are only just starting to blanket their white petals over everything we own. And the ramps look pretty good too.

The end.