Summer

I'm sitting here at my desk (about to start paying the monthly bills) and I can hear so many sounds coming in my open, shaded windows. I can look out and see the old rancher next door on his red tractor, making large circles in the field, making the first cutting of hay this season. The smell of freshly mown hay is drifting on the breeze, teasing me with remembrances of summers long past when I was a child and the neighbors would be cutting hay, and afterward we would haul load after load to our barn for winter feed for the horses. I remember the sweet grass smell, dry grass tickling my arms and legs and prickling too, hot summer sun and sweat, and billows of dust when each bale was thrown down from the truck to the pile.

As if that weren't enough distraction from my grown-up activities, I'm also hearing a riding lawn mower from my office window and smelling the freshly mown green grass. Charles is riding the dark green Craftsman mower, exercising dominion over the land by making the grass all uniformly short. I see him on his passes down and back around the open area across from our house, in the hot summer sun, watching the June beetles and bees buzzing and clicking their wings as they fly out of the way.

Isn't freshly mown grass the smell of summer? I was day dreaming a bit about that when I realized that though both smells are of freshly cut grass, they are distinctly different. The one makes me think of hot summers, where the land is beginning to dry up and iced peppermint tea in the shade is cooling and refreshing. The other makes me wish for summer, as if it weren't truly here yet. The green blades of grass, moist from the dew, have more of a promise of the heat yet to come.

Many other distractions pull at me: the rushing of the water in the creek, the birds twittering and calling to each other in my cherry trees, the whir of bike tread on asphalt as Nathanael goes whizzing down the road toward the river, the teasing breeze as it plays with the pages on my desk on it's way in the north and out the west window, and when both the tractor and the lawn mower are on the far side of the fields I can hear the rustle of the breeze in the burning bushes that flank my windows, and of course the dappled sunshine on the adirondack chairs set to over look the creek is teasing me to come out and play.

But, I need to grow up again, and after a sigh of remembrance and regret, go back to my responsibilities.

Yet... maybe I'll go play in the creek later with the boys!