Ligustrum memories: Astonishing how a tiny, fragrant white flower brings back so many memories of childhood in Daydreaming on the Porch

This is the first day so far this year in Charleston that it’s felt like summer. I noticed that “hot heat” all of a sudden.” It’s as if you walk outside and it’s instantly summer. The air sort of simmers, the warmth is suddenly all around you, nudging close. But Spring is pretty much gone now and summer is here.

Everywhere the ligustrum bushes have been in bloom, but the flowers are fading now. Although my sense of smell has mostly been lost over the past decade, I can still faintly detect the sweet, but fresh and slightly citrusy smell of the ligustrum bush’s white flowers, clustered in tiny bunches at the ends of branches.

This becomes a ritual each year at this tme. Ligustrum takes me back to my childhood whenever I pass the flowers and inhale their fragrance.

During the period in my life when I was 6-10 years old, we lived in a woodframe duplex apartment in a pleasantly named apartment neighborhood called Azalea Gardens in Jefferson Parish, Louisiana, just outside of New Orleans. One never forgets the names of certain places from childhood. They were built just after World War II.

In front of our duplex was a huge ligustrum bush, probably ten feet tall and eight feet wide and hollow inside. On late spring days, and into the summer when we were home from school and free to play outside to our hearts content, that ligustrum bush became a very special place indeed.

We kids watched a lot of westerns in those days: Hopalong Cassidy, Roy Rogers, The Lone Ranger, Bonanza, Palladin. Naturally all those adventures stirred deeply our 7 and 8 year old imaginations. There was an opening in the ligustrum bush, and once inside we pretended it was an Old West Saloon. On a concrete ledge we placed plastic drink dispensers. Of course we didn’t know what alcohol was but we saw those cowboys slamming open the doors to the saloons and striding up to the bars, so we thought it would be fun to do that, too. We had our play guns and holsters. It almost seems quaint now in this day and age of violent video games and movies, but you know, the 50s was simply a more innocent time.

We used our imaginations and we stayed outside running around and thinking up all kinds of things to do all day long. Life was one big outdoor amphitheater, and we were all actors.
In retrospect, the play guns of our childhood, with their caps and popping sounds, don’t seem that innocent. The Westerns were all about good guys and bad guys and lots of shootouts at the end, but some of them had good stories such as those on “Have Gun Will Travel” (Palladin) and “Bonanza” with all the dramas of the Cartwrights. Who could ever forget the inimitable Richard Boone in the role of Palladin? Or Hoss Cartwright? Bigger than life characters.
Still, as children we were impressionable, and I wish I had not been exposed to those shows. But that was many, many years ago and we kids certainly, and even our cautious parents never considered the deeper ramifications of all this. Again, it was the 1950s.

I was so enthralled with the Weaterns that a few years later in my early teens I bought Old West magazines, the kind you found in drug store magazine racks with realistic stories about Billy the Kid and Wyatt Earp, replete with photos and embellished accounts of their days of infamy or glory.

Years later as an adult, it was a very different person who traveled many a New Mexico and Arizona desert highway in search of history and the natural splendor of those grand Western landscapes.

Today, as I pass a ligustrum bush or small tree and stop to smell those tiny white flowers which stir so many memories and associations from long ago, I am reminded of the swift passage of time as we get older, particuarly. Those sunny days of childhood, represented a brief opportunity and time frame to be carefree before the more troubling times of adolescence set in. I could convert my Red Ryder wagon into a stagecoach with chairs on top, and race down the sidewalk pulling it behind me like a horse flying into the desert wind. Instead of live oaks and cracked sidewalks, I was blazing dusty trails, wide open blue skies overhead, pulling my laughing companions along with me.

Ligustrums in Spring bring all that back in my memories of long ago.

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Last updated May 06, 2024