for the scent of stinkbug. One of our dogs was skunked last
week, and although the smell has lessened somewhat, (in that your eyes don’t
actually burn when you enter the house) the smell is still pervasive.
Especially when the dog is wet, as she has been much of the past few days.
But I left all that behind on Friday and headed up to the
cabin for a little communing with neighbors who aren’t quite as noisy as the
ones in the alley behind my house. Even their language, when they do speak,
seems more musical and less, shall we say, prone to expletive. At least it
seems that way from where I’m sitting, although my deer is pretty rusty and my
squirrel even worse. They may well be screaming profanity at each other. I
prefer to think they are exchanging pleasantries.
“How’s the family, Smitty? Everybody okay in your neck of
the woods?”
“Doing fine, doing fine. Little Streak is playing acornball
now. He’s a wide tail receiver. First vine.”
But I digress.
I was talking about smells, and sounds. But really, it’s the
whole realm of the senses that gets activated this time of year. The smell of
stinkbugs might be strong inside the cabin, but the very cold snap that draws
these insects inside also reddens the leaves on the maples and sycamores,
burnishes the oaks and poplars. The sound of the rain on the tin roof is
punctuated by the rat tat tat of the acorns it brings down, and that same rain
draws out of the earth that indescribable smell of wet fall forest.
It’s all connected really, and that’s something I tend to
forget when I’m in town. Not so much because the smells of town are different.
They are, but it’s a small town. It’s not like I’m inhaling thick exhaust and
the odor of thousands of humans packed tightly together.
No, it’s more that when I’m in town my focus is split so
many different ways that it’s hard for me to comprehend the world around me as
a whole. When the dog was skunked the only reason I focused on anything besides
the smell was my fear that the skunk had somehow managed to trap itself under
the deck. Once I’d created an escape for it my total focus returned to the
smell, and getting rid of it as quickly as possible.
You may feel that makes sense for the smell of skunk, and I
suppose it does. But there’s a ripe quince sitting on my desk.
Then again, perhaps not. Up here on the mountain is where I
watched my almond tree fruit for two years, marveling at how similar in size
and shape the fruit was to that of a peach, before my wife pointed out to me
that the fruit that so resembled a peach also smelled and indeed tasted like
one. It was shortly after that that I realized that my non-flowering and
fruiting pear trees were probably actually poplars and wrote a nasty note to
the catalog company I’d purchased them all from years before.
Another digression. Perhaps this blog is really about
digression and I just haven’t realized it yet.But I think it’s really about how
we react to, and act upon, our sensory input. I’ve noticed that I’m happening
upon more new things lately. Some of them, like fall flowers and the yard signs
advertising local and state elections, are a product of this particular season.
Some of them, like the quince, the hunting paths full of bolete mushrooms, and
my quasi-fruit and nut trees have been right in front of me, although for some
reason out of the range of my senses until now.
Confession:
I wrote the section above two weeks ago when I
was last up at the cabin. I assumed I’d finish it up when I got home. I stopped there mostly
because I wasn’t sure where I was going, as is often the case with these
musings.
Usually I can look at something the next day, or at most a few days
later and make the connections that my mind refused to make until then.But lately it seems the only time
my mind is interested in musing at all is up here at the cabin. As I write this
the sky is graying from black and the tops of the mountains are just coming
into view. The leaves have been falling in earnest these past few weeks and through
the gaps in the trees the outlines of the mountains become clearer, more
distinct. During the summer you know you are surrounded, but it’s more feeling
than actual. As the trees grow bare the feeling of being enclosed inside a bowl
of mountain strengthens.
The smell is different, too, from
the last time I was here. Skunk replaced by stinkbug, and now stinkbug by the
indescribable perfume of a blanket of leaves on the earth. Smell seems richer
up here, more pure. Not more pure than skunk, perhaps, but the smell of
leaves up here isn’t interrupted by car
exhaust, or the left over perfume of trash day, or cigarette smoke from the
alley or any one of those hundreds of transitory little scents making up the layered atmosphere of town.
In these two weeks the colors have
morphed from yellow-tinged green
Maybe it’s just that discovery is
easier up here in the mountains, at least for me. Perhaps I need purity and
intensity in order to be able to see and hear and smell. It’s possible I have
to separate myself from others, from town, to be able to notice what’s all
around me.
And maybe, as usual, I’m
overthinking this. I’m here now, surrounded by flaming colors and deep, rich
smells. I can hear the stuttering motor sound of a ruffed grouse punctuated by
the rifle shot of an acorn hitting the tin roof, feel the cool of an autumn
morning on my skin. Maybe, just maybe,
that’s good enough. Or, as my friend Carolyn would say- it’s fine. It’s just fine.
And it is.
