Stories from Us: Neroli Season & What We Carry

There is a moment in spring when everything shifts; not in color or light, but in scent. The orange trees begin to bloom, and suddenly the air feels softer, fuller, almost suspended. This is neroli season in the Mediterranean.

It arrives quietly, but it changes everything. Without really noticing, you slow down. You stay a little longer. You begin to pay attention. This was how we knew.

We grew up among these trees in gardens that shaped our days without ever announcing themselves as something special. And when the blossoms came, we gathered. Not because we had to, not because it was planned, but because it was simply what that time of year asked of us.

We moved between branches and baskets, carefully picking the flowers. They were small, delicate, and abundant; enough to fill our hands, enough to share. We would sit together and thread them into necklaces and crowns, passing them from one to another.

We didn’t think of it as a ritual. We didn’t call it anything at all.

It was just how we were together. Looking back, it feels like something older than us; something we stepped into without realizing. A rhythm that already existed, and that we followed without question.

We don’t gather them like that anymore. Now, we stand beneath the trees and let them be. We notice them differently. We take in their full presence; their scent, their quiet abundance, the way they transform the air around them.

We watch them bloom, and in time, fall, turning quietly into fruit. Somewhere in that cycle, the past finds its way back to us; not as a clear image, but as a trace in the air, like orange blossoms that remain, quietly.

Not everything returns in a way we can hold. Some things return as a feeling; something that settles into the body before it can be named. A familiarity that doesn’t ask to be explained. Perhaps this is how certain memories choose to stay. Not fixed in time, not preserved as they were, but carried; reshaped, softened, woven into the present without announcing themselves.

The trees continue, season after season.

Blooming, falling, becoming.

And we move alongside them, differently now, but still within the same rhythm.

No longer gathering, but still noticing.

No longer making, but still remembering.

And maybe that is enough.

To stand beneath the same trees, to breathe in what once surrounded us, and to recognize it; not as something distant, but as something that has never quite left.

With Love,

Prickly Pears Sisters 🌿

Bengisu & Nagehan

---