Catching Scents

Ah, we've entered into the dark months, always a hard time for me. (I appreciate these months, but they're hard.) I came across this piece from about 20 years ago, about the end of winter and thought I'd share it.

I’ve been catching scents: crossing the parking lot at school when suddenly I smell the mud, just briefly, and then it’s gone again. I know that mud, I know that smell, I think, it’s the late winter smell that comes after several days of thawing, the ground soft underfoot, water coming up as you press the earth down. It comes with the sideways sweep of wind on your arms until suddenly you know, without knowing how, that maybe you won’t need to wear a sweater tomorrow, and you start watching the trees for budding. I look for the moss, delicate sharp flowerlets of bright green, no larger than a thumbtack. The grass is still brown, the soil looks dead, but bending closer under the cover of withered grass is the moss: luxurious, rampant, abundant, if oh so tiny. From here on in I know that spring is coming, even if it snows again. I live in this world, I am embedded in this world, I am the world, and even if I forget it sometimes the truth remains because, see, there’s a whiff of mud suddenly as I cross the parking lot at school.

            I hear the birds so clearly now. I woke up this morning thinking kids were playing on the street and it was the birds: loud, joking, calling their good-mornings to the sky and to each other.

            I went for a walk today through town, up by all the older houses and the cemetery. I was going along, in my own head, when I was struck by a rosebush in front of me. How else can I say it: the sight of the tangled branches, the thorns, the dried rose-hips stopped me as surely as if I’d been hit. All the many shades of brown in the new stems, now gray, lined, no longer thorned but weathered, crisp; the delicacy of the rose-hips purple-red-brown and tough, their hard shiny surface surrounded with a lace of leftover leaves. These had lasted the winter, the storms and the wind, the carelessness of people passing no longer looking now that the roses were gone. The roses told me: stop, and, slow down, and I did, I did, in time to see the tree limb weaving the air into being for me, in time to watch the rippling of water beneath my feet. I stopped and looked below the grate and saw the coursing of water two feet below me. There is water beneath my feet! I stood and listened to the water flowing by, on its own way, water tumbling over itself and joined by more and more water winding its way down the streets to the grate, to… I realized I didn’t know where the water went to after that. I left this for another day and continued walking, but before I had even gone five feet I was stopped by another call of water falling, running. Two grates! one on each side of the street, and I stood there and listened to the water running on both sides of me, running down, running down from everywhere, and now I could hear the plink, plink of water dripping onto slate below a tree and the faster fall of water in the gutters and drainpipes along the houses. Everywhere was water, water, and I stood in the middle of it all and listened.

Cheers -
SA