Tonight while driving home at half past midnight I peeled a banana (not green, but neither ripe), and for a full minute the newly opened space where the inside of the peel had rested against the fruit smelled like bluebonnets.

I didn't even know I remember what they smell like. My family moved from Texas to Colorado when I was six years old, and the only memory I have of bluebonnets is my parents (or at least my mother) taking me to a field that was carpeted with bluebonnets and Indian paintbrush, the whole thing a jewelled sea of red and violet-blue. I loved picking flowers, and this field was the most lush satisfaction of greed I have ever experienced. I never once needed to stand up and walk to another flower: they grew so densely on the ground that I only had to shuffle forward a little, bent, to gather another half dozen. I was probably about five.

Even now, after the experience of this evening, I have no accessible memory of what they smell like. But in the car, in the space between the unripe banana's peel and the column of fruit itself, it took me only one second, or maybe two, to think, with simple certainty, "Bluebonnets."

I inhaled it deeply and carefully until the scent dissipated, and I described it to myself so that I would be able to write, here, what bluebonnets smell like, since it is unlikely that I will ever get to smell them again. It is not a sweet smell, like jasmine, but it is a floral one, fresh as lilies and yet nothing at all like the smell of lilies. It has a little of the odour of its companion Indian paintbrush about it, something of the fresh juice of crushed field-mullein leaves, a field smell, a going-for-a-hike smell, that disappointing smell of wildflowers that do not really smell of anything; but there is something atop it that is much more than that and that lupines, the Rocky Mountains cousins of Texas' bluebonnets, do not have at all. A very little bit it smells like narcissus, but not the flower of narcissus, only the plant, or else the flower after it has just opened, before it has a chance to fully develop its sweet and sharp odour. Bluebonnet is not heady or fuzzy, but neither is it sharp.