The Scent of it Lingers

I was up early for a run. My path turned East in time to see the rising sun paint orange ribbons across my horizon. The weather was cool, but humid. The air clung to my shirt in drops and dripped off the end of my nose with every fourth stride.

When the air is that humid, it seems to intensify smells, as if the scent is captured in the moisture, hanging mid-air, waiting to be inhaled. As my path ran through tall grass laying freshly cut, I breathed deeply a smell from my past.

French novelist Marcel Proust said "When nothing else subsists from the past, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered - the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls bearing resiliently, on tiny and almost impalpable drops of their essence, the immense edifice of memory."

The smell of cut hay opens, for me, an immense edifice of memory of my adolescence. It is the smell of hayfields on a hot summer day from my teenage years, hayfields on my grandpa's farm. The feelings are strong, and conflicting. It is the memory of being exactly where I wanted to be and doing what I wanted to be doing, yet also the worry of doing it right, appearing competent and capable.

I remember this one afternoon, my last day before we moved rather far from the farm, I raked hay using an old John Deere. As the day neared its end, my grandpa waited at the edge of the field in his truck. When I finally climbed into the cab, he said, "You could have combined those last windrows instead of making so many passes. But I figure you wanted to make it last." Yes, I did. And for good reason, because that memory is now all that's left.