Mom: April 2004 Archives
Of all the senses I like, and honestly I like them all, it’s my sense of smell I’m most dazzled by. Have you seen my nose? It’s huge and not much goes by that I don’t end up inhaling. In the city, I was ripe for pollution-induced allergies which miraculously, but unsurprisingly, cleared up after we moved to Bashert. I’m more responsive to smells and more likely to be knocked for a loop by a sudden smell triggering a deep memory than by just about anything else which I believe supports research’s supposition, showing over and over again, the powerful, synergistic connection between smell and memory.
Today was the first 70+ degree day and it was loaded with the smell of spring, finally. The cold, wet days we’ve had over the last month have kept most of the trees from greening up though the grass is getting verdant and the daffodils are up. They don’t have the sense of Job but then again, nothing kills them and the deer won’t touch them to save their winter-starved lives so they obviously know what they’re doing. While I was suppose to spend most of the day indoors reading about organizational behavior and management for school, eventually I had to close up the books and move outside to walk around the yard, kick around the limbs that need to be picked up and rifle through the flowerbeds, dreaming of what should go where and figure out how I’m going to manage all the work that needs to get done.
It was finally walking back to the house late this afternoon, pulling in deep fistfuls of warm, afternoon spring air that the memory struck me like a thunderbolt. Mom. If there was ever an Earth Mother/Wiccan/Mother Nature, it was my Mom. She was a woman of Spring and Summer unlike any other I’ve known. Really powerful and connected during those seasons…really alive and in her own way, verdant. She loved taking the whole day to mow her yard and putter around the flowerbeds or just sit out back and soak it in and get sun-kissed. The day I missed her most was the day after she died last year; an unseasonably warm, sunny, early spring day we spent outside on the back porch of her house with my family, flying kites and just really, really grieving in a way that at the time didn’t feel like grieving at all. It was one of those unbearable days that looking back was tinged with a wonderful, deep river of emotion that I find so hard to share, usually. It’s amazing to me how in that one instant of being outside this afternoon, I had a deep but immediate connection with Mom again. That was in and of itself as powerful and exhilarating as just being able to enjoy the first real day of spring. I live for days like today but I think everyone knows what I’m talking about. You only get that extraordinary New Spring exhilaration once or twice a year after being literally beaten down from the drawn out, gray days of a late, wet winter. I completely needed mine right now, today, so how weirdly, wonderfully, perfect.
