A soft stirring in the ground

I did smell it today, for the first time this year.

The heady smell of fresh-cut grass, moving undaunted through automobile fumes, invaded every corner of my sinuses and reduced me to fragments of memories: summer days, heat, water, the precision of neatly cut rows in the lawn, the time lost in the Zen concentration of moving a whirring mower back and forth. It was never a fun job, facing futility week after week for cutting something that would just grow back.

But the smell. Cut grass meant a revival, a renewal. Grass was growing, flowers were blooming, trees were budding. The world was waking up. The air would be getting warmer and we had survived the long darkness of winter. Soon, the engine of a lawn mower would break the stifling blanket of humid air, signaling another waft of earthy perfume coming this way.

Futile as the task may have been, the result gave me the smell of nature, announcing that it was alive and back in action. As much as I claim to be an urban dweller, there will always be that aroma of cut grass that'll take me into some, distant happy place of summer, of swimming pools, of no school, of sleeping in, of lightning bugs, of ice cream trucks, of sunsets making the STOP sign near my childhood home glow like a fire totem, and the remaining procession in the joyous parade of mental heirlooms that make me grateful for green plots of earth.

Today's Word...

…is still antenna. Bleh.