Scents and Memory

Its interesting how a scent will bring up an emotion.  The smell of cut grass in the summer time brings me right back to being 7 years old, spending the summer with my cousins in Farmland, Indiana. 

I'm cheerfully biking around a small town that seems endless and, fairly interesting in its detail. Despite the fact that in reality nothing was going on, it was and is a dead town and, held up against any other town in america, is as dull as the proverbial dishwater.  The truth is, dishwater  may have some more interesting properties to it than that of Farmland. But I was a kid, and biking around a nothing town is more than interesting, its new and fascinating.

The cut grass of Anywhere In Summertime reminds me, of climbing up a metal tube that was the local school's fire escape. For us the fire escape chute was a slide, one we had to climb into to reach the escape door at the top floor of the school. All in order to shoot back down, to the ground level below. that 40 foot climb upward and slide downward had to be frought with all kinds of perils.  

I can tell you that I do recall seams within that metal tube, as we slid back down.  If one of the seam-lips of that tube were bent or damaged, it would be easy to shear ourselves open in one way or another. But kids have a way of miraculously escaping danger, despite the questionable things they engage in. And climbing the tube was one activity that didn't bite us on the ass.  If I were an adult witnessing what we were doing, I'd either yell and scream or beat our asses for climbing along and up into that steep metal tunnel. 

But there wasn't anyone around to witness what were doing, for better or worse; it was like being in a desert wasteland, there by the public school. This was a bona fide farm town, and people mustve been indoors escaping the July heat.

Acts that  human society surely engaged in as soon as "shelter" was created: Find Food. Make clothing. Build shelter. Get the fuck out of the sun, wind and rain. 

This dead down, heated and dried from the summer sun, was just another hot dry summer spot where nothing much was going on. And the smell of cut grass brings me right back there.