When I did tire after a while, Mom would scoop me up in her arms and wade chest-deep in the salty Long Island Sound. The water might have been chilly, but her skin was always warm and smelled comforting, like the scent of warm sunlight pouring through a window screen or the familiar musky sweetness of my own pillow. It was, perhaps, the only scent more familiar to me than my own. Mom laughed, and bobbed, danced and glided through the water. Smiling at each other and laughing together, our eyes stinging from salt water, I never felt more loved, safe, and secure.

Nowadays, the only time I come across that scent is when I’m in the ocean with my two little boys. For a brief moment, I forget myself. And then I realize it’s me who now evokes the scent of childhood’s unconditional, loving, endless summer.

When I was growing up we lived next door to an old lady named Rosie. Rosie’s husband had passed long before we moved into the neighborhood and her only daughter lived hours away. Rosie sort of adopted my sister and I, and our family adopted her back. She rarely left her house, and never ventured out of her yard.

Planted along the hedges between our two yards were 3 gorgeous lilac trees. Rosie had planted them, two light purple and one dark, when she and her husband had first bought the house. The trees hung over our driveway and I could smell them from my bedroom every spring.

Rosie was happy to allow my sister and I to cut bunches of fresh lilacs from her trees. The bouquets ended up as Mother’s Day gifts for my mom, were plunked into mason jars to decorate our kitchen table and were wrapped in wet paper towels and brought to school for favorite teachers.

Rosie has long since passed, but whenever I smell lilac I remember her generosity to two little girls who she came to think of as family.