hello, spring...nice to smell you

When people start honking about spring, they usually honk about the same things: how nice and green everything gets, or how blue the sky is, or how prettily the birds are twittering, or how warm the air's getting, or how lovely the flowers smell. Come on, people. Those are obvious. They're nothing that every other human being on Starship Earth hasn't honked about every spring for the last five thousand years. I think these folks are taking a bit for granted. How about a little appreciation for being able to smell again, period?

I love winter, make no mistake. I like snow. It's great for hiding from one's enemies. I like ice. Nothing like a little Cha-Cha Slide down the sidewalk. But more than all that, I like cold. I've never been able to stand hot weather. Dry heat's bad enough, but moist heat? Gag me. Better yet, drown me. At least I'll die quickly from total immersion rather than being slowly suffocated. With cold (or even cool) weather, I can do whatever the heck I like and not break a sweat. Nothing beats a bad mood, a hangover, or writer's block like stepping outside and receiving an icy blast of air in your face.

I'm serious. Try it sometime if you don't believe me.

There's just one thing I dislike about winter, though. It's the sterility of the air. The lack of smells bothers me. I hate stepping outside, taking a sniff, and having my boogers freeze. No, no, I don't mind that, on second thought. Frozen boogers I can handle. What I mind is not being able to smell anything. No flowers, no grass, no trees, not even the dirt. It gets to me after a while. Oh, coming in out of the cold and wet and getting a hit of roast turkey or pumpkin pie is great. But there's just no substitute the smell of grass on a spring day.

I walked out of the airport with Spud last week right after the landscaper got done mowing the median in the parking lot. A big ol' whiff of cut grass smacked me right in the kisser. And man, it was glorious. Fairly shouted that springtime was here. Nothing beats going out on a walk in March and smelling the dirt. Winter didn't hit us too hard down on Geoje Island in South Korea, but things still froze up pretty well. But when springtime rolled around, and the sun came out, and the ground thawed, and you could smell the dirt again... It's hard to beat that wet-dirt smell. It's just as much a part of spring as daffodils and cherry blossoms, if not more. A nice noseful of that will brighten anybody's day.

I live in the desert, as you know. Grass is scanty around here. Greenery of any kind is. The appearance of spring isn't so much a literal "appearance"; it's a gradual lengthening of the days, a warming of the atmosphere, and a marginal revamping of the local smells and scents. So perhaps I'm more sensitive to smells than most. I knew it was spring when I stepped outside yesterday in the predawn twilight and smelled the desert (without it having rained first). I smelled sand. I smelled rock. I smelled plants. I smelled houses and people. It wasn't quite as divine as, say, someplace more fertile like Tennessee or South Korea. But it smelled pretty dang good, after the sterility of winter. I took a deep breath and said to myself, "Okay, I guess I'm ready for spring after all."

Welcome back, spring. My nose missed you.