Meandering Thoughts (#12)

Sigh. I know. I'm writing about the wrong season. However, I wrote about autumn before. Especially about the first month of school. So, I decided to maintain that emotional draw of fall, but relate it to another memory, but one that occurred in the opposing season. Clever, right? Not really. I just started typing away, hiding in one direction. Then I got pulled into a different one. Driven partly by my procrastination, and partly by sheer physical exhaustion (painting, laundry, cleaning, hauling), I reigned in my original idea for this post, reworked it, condensed it. And now I am going to find an image, and be done with it.

(Yeah, this guy again. You'll understand soon enough.)

Once, long ago, I read a book written by a scientist. He dedicated each chapter to some deep thought that he had developed throughout his life. One in particular has been embedded in my unconscious ever since first reading it. The author was fascinated by how the biological act of smelling something can trigger specific childhood memories. In turn those memories stir up a psychological response. Even half a lifetime later. For him it was the scent of burning foliage. As his senses absorbed this aroma, his brain conjured recollections of his family collecting and igniting piles of dry autumn leaves. While these images filled his mind, a chemical process would unleash an emotional response.  In this case, nostalgia. 

For me, it's the smell of freshly cut grass. The memory is that of standing in a baseball field. Early morning, cool, dew on the ground. Taking the field at the start of the game, with a clean uniform. The early April sun still hiding behind a row of tall pines. But three decades later, it is not nostalgia that overwhelms my psyche. I sucked at baseball, as did my first team. There is a reason why Charlie Brown is my spirit comic strip character. The second team was a bit better, but I still did not know what I was doing. After two years, I never bothered playing again.

Yet, the scent of a recently mowed lawn does not invoke anger or humiliation, despite its association with my short baseball career. Neither does it call forth sadness nor regret. Whenever I find myself stepping outside my house and catching the faint perfume of cut grass, the memory of taking a field for the first time in a new game, at the beginning of a Spring season, triggers, of all things, a sense of hope. Embedded within a line of memories filled with personal failures, disappointments, a winless season, and a few embarrassing mistakes, is that exhilarating moment of feeling anything is possible.

Like Charlie Brown, each new game, with freshly washed white pants and a pair of stain-free socks, a season not yet played, a 0-0 record on the books, a slate wiped clean, a rising sun cresting a tree line, and a neatly mowed, in crisscrossed fashion, field of dew kissed field of grass stretching out before me.

Optimistic? Foolish? A bit of both?

Who knows.

But what I am certain of is that I refuse to let go of that fragment of hope.