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.

"I got the trees on my mirror"

The smell was from one of the earlier haunted houses. The one that was at the old Idlewild school. I must have been in elementary school. I don't like the abuse/bastardization of the word epic, but those haunted houses were. There were illusions, hydraulic floors, swinging bridges, chainsaws, then flame-throwers. All volunteer, put on by the Kiwanis Club, work done in the evenings. They were community events, and scarier than any haunted houses I've seen since.

The smell was from the room my father's crew haunted, set up like a swamp, with brush and cattail cuttings, or the one next door, which was a woods scene. It was something that had been cut. But the smell this time wasn't from elementary school, or Idlewild, but this past Sunday, during a run along Rails to Trails. It was instant recognition as the same smell, it conjured it up precisely, to the sea creature mask my dad wore.

My wife has mentioned a smell--something like honeysuckle maybe, but I can't recall--that she knows as her grandfather. Something that was in his house. When she smells it, she knows it is him saying hello.

I am sight-oriented. For learning, for memorizing, I have always been a visual person. Smell would probably rank among my least go-to senses. Which made the haunted house flashback, while out for a 5-mile rise up run Sunday morning, stand out more.

It's a season of smells. The smell of Thanksgiving in Butler, Pa., and the smell of a soon-to-be-cut Christmas tree in the living room. It's likely my nose getting ready. Nose in training. Amping up performance for the evergreen smell that smells like childhood.