Where smells can take you

Summer is almost here!!! I was driving around last night with the windows down blasting whiskeytown and was so content it isn’t even fair. I don’t see how anyone can be unhappy when the weather is perfect, it smells like cut grass, and Ryan Adams is singing in your ears. You need to have yourself checked out if that can’t make you happy.

I don’t know if anyone else has scent memories, but the smell of cut grass reminds me so much of the neighborhood I grew up in. It reminds me of the disgusting pile of “outside shoes” that were covered in mud and grass stains and usually had at least a couple of insects inside of them that sat out side our garage door. It reminds me of the time I captured 200 “pet” minnows from the creek down the street and then promptly killed them when I tried to transfer them to chlorinated water. (I may have played outdoors, but that doesn’t mean the clean freak inside of me didn’t want everything to be as sterile as possible.) It reminds me of the baby chicks my parents got us for Easter one year, that we later gave to a farm, that then got eaten by coyotes.(Can you believe my parents gave us farm birds?) It reminds me of the time my friend Annie and I went hiking behind the creek to see the Indian grave and instead found a bunch of people running around in towels…we told her mom, she called the owners of the land, we found out later…much later that they were making porn. It reminds me of the girl across the street that ate flowers. Man after rereading that I am very disturbed by my childhood. That sounds like the prologue to a book that ended with…from then on Tiffany spent the rest of her 48 years at the center. She devoted her life to building to scale replicas of dinosaurs with popsicle sticks. She only ate some of the glue.