Lavender

I read about them in The Los Angeles Times, lavender fields that stretch far and look like Provence except you're in Ojai, a hop and a skip from balmy Los Angeles so I packed up the car with kids and a helper and hit the road, Jack, to meet our friends Phil and Erika and Izzy, to Ojai for the annual Ojai Lavender Festival, a town park with a fountain and nearly a hundred booths the smell of lavender wafting (there's no better word than wafting, here) around us all. I breathed it in, deep, and yearned for the lavender massage, the cold lavender soaked cloth over my eyes, the strong hands kneading my hands and feet but there wasn't time because we needed to get to the fields of lavender and that's where the wafting turned to breathful, breathless, fields of lavender, light to dark purple, lavender to lie down in where the bees don't sting because it's paradise.