scents & senses

As my family and countless others back east struggle with the 59 or so inches of snow that has fallen so far this winter, my heart opens today into 53 degree temperatures. It is both scary (we need moisture) and welcome. Either way it's beautiful and brief. Forcing me from my desk and out to the park with Spike for a long walk. The sky is so blue I'm searching for my husband's art supply catalogue to find a name for it, this enormous cloudless ceiling that, depending upon which direction you happen to be looking toward, goes from pale blue to deep cobalt.

The leaves and pods left on the trees are brittle and brown and catch the afternoon sunlight.

 Lovely long blurred shadows of bare trees reach across my path and the wingbeats of the ravens are fast against the wind, their cries loud and sharp. There is no trilling or chirping in the park this afternoon. It doesn't feel like spring. It feels like a warm day in mid-winter. I shed my handwarmers and hat, unzip my fleece jacket. I begin to differentiate the smells of wood smoke: that's cedar, this must be pinon. Pine smoke near the house with the strange graffiti on the side wall.

A woman in a long black coat and hat passes me twice on the paths, smiling. A trail of incense scent lingers in her wake. When I pass the two Taos Pueblo men on a bench they smell of bonfires. In an adjacent parking lot a group of high school kids is listening to rap music on the car radio and the smell of marijuana briefly drifts across my path. I bend to take a picture of the patches of snow that remain and notice the loamy wet scent of the soil. Spike notices it too and I can't call him away from it.

We're both assailed by the new information we're getting from the land today. And I can't help thinking that this is just a park. A town park with traffic beyond its gates, rap music nearby, kids shouting in a playground, a church next door, a basketball hoop on the tennis court. But for a girl who grew up in a city and still prefers sidewalks to trails, it's nearly perfect. And, oh yes, that yellow lichen on the brown and gray tree bark?

Wouldn't it make a lovely yarn color? I think I may have seen something like it somewhere. Didn't I once knit a boyfriend sweater in those colors? Tree bark and lichens. I'll have to go now and do some research. If you have any ideas about it, I'm open to them.

I find myself being mentored by the land again
                                   Terry Tempest Williams