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.

The day after Andy Irons died

Drinking coffee in the afternoon, the day after the election when all the world wants to talk about is who won, who lost, what it all means.

Funny how government is now a competition with clear-cut winners and losers when really it's just a volleyball rotation of the same players with different names; no longer about doing something together.

Drinking coffee in the afternoon, when all the country wants to talk about is what a bonehead Randy Moss is and the nerve, and what team will he end up on.

Drinking coffee in the afternoon, the day after Andy Irons died. But nobody is really talking about it. He was 32. One of the very best in the world, living a life, doing a job that most people, that for 25 years I have thought would kick ass.

He walked on water around the world. I only knew him from video, through interviews, articles, photos. And yet it seems like a bigger deal to me than a concession speech or a new helmet. One of the few who lived his dream in the world.

And while nobody really talks about Andy Irons, who died in a hotel room in Dallas, not known as a surfing town, I learned something today.

I had never heard of Dengue Fever.