A small rent in a compartment wall

Jasmine from Flickr collection online

Saleh Eddine (you pronounce that SAL-eh-deen like it's one word), one of our local consultants, brings me jasmine blossoms. He has discovered how much I love the out-sized scent of those tiny flower. Jasmine vines sprout all over the front of the villa, and he has taken to picking them and leaving them on my computer. Today, I turned the table and brought him one.

After that I've been homesick all day. Inexplicably. I hardly ever am. But it was that sweet heavy scent. Jasmine grew all twisted and nearly out of control around the side door of the house in Sarasota that was a victim of divorce. It always seemed so Confederate, so Tara-like southern, and I loved it. A whiff of that old memory and the little locked compartment in my head in which Sarasota is packed away was sprung open.

A thought taken from the wonderful book I finished, The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen, has helped. It's about homesickness.

Nostalgia, he wrote, is the ability to forget how much things sucked.