Certain sensations have a way of bringing back memories with stark clarity. My father's cologne is a familiar and distinct smell that goes back to my childhood and warm nights spent playing board games on the carpet as a family. When I was even younger and we still lived in that apartment on 13th Avenue I began to associate the smell of coffee with my Aunt Susan, who used to live on the floor below us.
But years from now, what will bring me back to the early days of my marriage are the smells of Spring and the chiming of church bells.
There are few places in the world that can really truly appreciate the tender hope that spring brings with its budding weeks, but I believe Ohio is one of those places. Winter is our longest season, and it's icy and windy and wet and miserable; a good snowfall is a rare treat, and when we still get snow in April it ceases to be a treat at all. But when the good holidays end after the first of the year, and January follows December like an icy punctuation mark, the body longs to get past the cold lingering wetness of February and stretch into a hopeful, if tempestuous, March. March is a flirt, and not a nice one at that, the way she gives one warm and sunny 70 degree day only to bluster in with sleet for the following week is cruelly coy at best.
But March brings the bravest of flowers, the tiny trumpets of purple crocuses poking through the winter-weary lawn. Daffodil greens start to take shape on every street, and by the end of the month they're pregnant with yellow and ready to shine. Then April, beautiful April, seems to be the world waking up. Birds once quiet with cold can't help but to sing from every branch, a delightful cacophony, the original and unequalled album of music. Trees' hard nubs begin blushing with life and unfold everywhere with quiet sighs of satisfaction. Magnolia blossoms the size of my hand, petals the size of my tongue and pink as sunset, steal the show. Bradford pear trees turn snowy white and in the suburbs they line the neighborhood streets, soft as cumulus clouds. But now, in late April, the pinks and whites on the trees and the purples and yellows in the gardens are giving way more and more to an overwhelming GREEN. Leaves are usurping the trees, branch by branch, and petals are perpetually falling in the warming air.
I walked home from the library, past tiny weeping cherries with small pink petals and vivid green lawns long enough for the first time this year for the wind to whip through in waves. The wind is brisk, but not sharp; the sun is bright, but not hot; if I stood still I would shiver but when I walk the temperature is perfect. Cutting down a sidewalk path across private apartment lawns as a shortcut home, the bells began to ring. Within a mile of my house there are 3 churches who play (at least recordings of) their bells. It was six'o'clock, and the church on the corner of Henderson rang the full hour and six soulful dongs. As I stepped off the green green lawn to cross the street, the church began to play as it does every day, at noon and at six, an old hymn with its chimes. Hymns that go back to my childhood, tunes that I recall but I've long lost the old lyrics. I opened my door to the last refrain of the hymn, and from my window as the last verse played in the April air I took in my neighborhood: the dusty brown baseball diamond at the elementary school, the purple puddle of violets under the tree across the street, the tentatively blue sky being whisked away by a dark stormy cloud.
I love where I live.
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