Of scent and dreams

As I walked out of the building yesterday the distinct smell of fresh water wafted in. Not the smell-after-rain, but something higher, cooler, like snow on mountains near trees. Last night on the terrace, I smelled it again, drifting up.

The crabapple in front of our brownstone has opened. Sniffing the sprays of flower solved the mystery. They smell like clean water. Perhaps its roots join an aquifer...the bees like it.

Years ago, before the publicized bee crisis, I dreamed a Mexican man was going door to door in Alexandria, VA - where I used to live in the old town - selling the services of his bees, which he carried in a white hive. He knocked on our red door. He said that he had been a fisherman, and that the silver sardines he used to catch, in blue nets, had disappeared, so now his family was in America, taking bees door to door for pollination.