When I was six or seven, we lived one year in a small bungalow on a street near the edge of Dartmouth, Nova Scotia. The street climbed the gentle, south slope of a hill, and our house overlooked a valley with a pond that froze solid enough in the winter for skating. We owned a beautiful collie -- my first love. The grass grew long in the vacant lot beside our house. Past the end of the street, hay fields led to a farmyard and large barn belonging to a man who didn't seem to mind the intrusions of young children.
The smells of that place imprinted themselves on me, especially the scents of grass and hay. I've made several site visits in the last month, walking through old fields and skirting hedgerows and woodlots. The wet spring pushed the grasses up early and high. As my legs brushed through the dense stems, I felt again like that child in Dartmouth. Sensations rose around me, clinging to me like hay seed in the hairs on my bare arms. In a more innocent moment, I could have flattened a place for myself hidden in the grass under the blue sky, listened to the birds and thought life was forever.
Similarly, sensation overcomes me when I dive into a clear lake in the Madwaska Highlands. I'm emersed in the smell of living water. It lingers on my skin, in my hair and in my nostrils until my next sterile shower. Other, stronger smells linger deep in my very being, where they have spliced themselves into my psychic DNA: the astringent smell of the sea and shore; the deep symphony of odours in the mould of a B.C. rain forest; the savor of dust rising from a prairie dirt road, as comforting as fresh baked bread.
When life ends... when the sight grows dim and the sounds recede... I wonder if the scent of life, or the remembered scent of life, is the last sense to pass away. That wouldn't be a bad thing, to leave life in wrapped in memories of pine forests and mountain light.
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