Spring smells like

The first thing I do when I get up in the morning is breathe in coffee beans. It's almost a ritual. Fill my nose with the smell of coffee, maybe in anticipation, or maybe to see if I can imbibe some caffeine through the nose.

Spring is a smell season. It's the smell of coffee brewing in the house. It's the smell of newly mulched and planted gardens. Of cut tulips on the table. It's the smell of whatever is on the grill for dinner. It's spring ale right after the top is popped. It's the smell of warm rain on the grass. Or if you're Carl Sandburg (fast forward to summer):

Summer mornings on the docks I walk among bushel peach

baskets piled ten feet high.

Summer mornings I smell new wood and the river wind

along with peaches.

Yeah, I know Sandburg is smelling summer, but he's part of why I got thinking of spring smells, so work with me. Peaches and new wood and river wind. If Yankee Candle made that scent, we'd have it in our house.

Smell is the step-child of the senses. If you had to give one of your senses up, which would be the first to go? Sight? Hearing? Taste? Touch? Nope. So long smell. But spring would suffer for it.

Smell wakes up in the spring after taking the winter off. Roll your windows down crossing the Bay and spring smells like salt.

For our girls, spring smells like the Oxford Park. It smells like snail hunting and collecting on the rocks along the Tred Avon River. It smells like river water splashed on your clothes while you're eating ice cream in an oldish Ford truck, with the windows down, letting all the spring smells swirl.

From the cosmos to the common

 
I pour lukewarm coffee, thick and black and still and deep as ink. As it hits my tongue, not as hot as I like it, I am moved.

I am moved by Gary Snyder and his advice for children.

I am moved thinking about astronomers watching a baby black hole and the changing, transient consequent universe, that still seems to us fixed.

I am moved by family, the girls getting awards at school, and reading together; Ava falling asleep in leotard and tights on the top bunk bed; the tone in Robin's laugh and the open wonder in her questions; and Anna asking who were Merlin and Charles "Dicksen" and Shakespeare from her book.

I am moved by gratitude and how whenever I hear or see that word, gratitude, I hear the Beastie Boys in my head.

I sip room temperature coffee in the afternoon and I am moved by all of it, from the cosmos to the common, and what to do with it all and then I hear Gary Snyder:

To climb these coming crests
one word to you, to
you and your children:

Stay together
learn the flowers
go light.

Hey, Gary. Thanks.

A Prayer, Listening in the Spring

Merwin gives me hope. When I feel like I've wasted too much time. I've started too late. I haven't done enough. I should have committed earlier.

W.S. Merwin was born in 1927. He won his second Pulitzer Prize in 2009 for a book published in 2008. I'm not a big math guy, but that's something like 81 years. And prizes aren't everything, but that book, "The Shadow of Sirius," is one of the best I've experienced ("read" isn't a strong enough word).

I'm not halfway to 80. I'm not grandiose or vain enough to aspire to be a Merwin, but he gives me hope that I've got my best stuff ahead of me. He gives me hope for exploring self and world and the big questions and observations over the long haul. I read his "Migration: New & Selected Poems" like a landmark standing on the rocky trail on the uncharted search for the soul. So I wake up and it's spring now, and I am listening.

It's spring and that means the birds sing in the morning dark, awake and chatting while people sleep. And I am listening.

It's spring and the warm weather and light air lighten my legs running at sunrise. And I am listening.

It's spring and the girls ride their bikes around the neighborhood, wide eyed and windy smiled. And I am listening.

It's spring and our five-year-old, our youngest daughter sleeps sideways across the bed, stretched and she's skinny and longer than she has ever been, no longer a baby. And I am listening.

It's spring and my shoulders and calves lengthen, elongated, smiling through Downward Facing Dog, different than they were yesterday. And I am listening.

It's spring and Robin and I are coming on 15 years spent together, 15 out of not quite 38, and I think of the things we have done and seen and been, together, and what we have yet to do, or see or be, together. And I am listening.

It's spring and my hands are in the dirt again and the sun is warm on my skin and the gardens that we can never sustain or keep up with are full of possibility, waiting to see if this is their year. And I am listening.

It's spring and I think about Mother Teresa's commentary on prayer, that she and God both sit, saying nothing to each other, just listening. And I am listening.