It was simply the smell of freshly cut grass that hit me today as I crossed the lawn to the library. The smell of freshly cut grass that transported me back to Boulder, Colorado 1979 when I was a 19-year-old gardener on campus for the summer. The fresh, perfect smell of cut grass that I inhaled day after day that dry, hot summer as I pushed the lawn mower across miles of green lawn under the tower of the Rockies. A job that had me watering, mowing, cutting back bushes, picking up litter, and trimming trees with my friend Greg, whose love for Neil Young rivaled mine, becoming competitive in a game we played where we’d recite a single line from a certain song challenging the other to name both song and album.
It was simply the smell of freshly cut grass that transported me today, out of my life; the decision whether to let my husband continue his dance with the ballerina even though her husband and I have ended ours; the brewing drama with my 11-year-old on whether to let her quit the gymnastics team because it leaves her little time to play with other kids; the decision of which book idea I could actually follow through with; the anxiety of whether the new and expensive dress my mother bought me for my birthday is too small and whether it’s too late to return it; the image of my friend who is very sick and possibly dying repeatedly slapping his young son on the back yesterday because the boy wouldn’t listen to him and how the moment stood still for me as I watched him strike his son with hands gone weak because of an illness that is robbing him of all of his strength, his ability to speak and to parent the way he might have imagined.
Grass that transported me past the business of money and whether I am doing my artist husband a favor by bailing him out of being broke each month; whether I’m doing the ballerina a favor by sharing my husband so she doesn’t feel nearly as lonely with hers; the scheme to stop answering my office phone in case it’s her husband, a man I am trying to rinse from my psyche because his departure leaves me confronting my own loneliness and pain.
It was simply the smell of that grass that took me, let me breath in and forget, for a moment as I crossed the lawn today and entered the library.
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These are the fast and dirty ramblings of a woman who is barreling straight into her middle age. These writings come from the middle of her life, not a particularly bad time either. She’s not freaked out. She doesn’t sit on the couch all day watching soaps and fantasizing about a life completely out of reach.
10 comments:
just stumbled to your site at this moment by chance, but I love this post. so real. so present. so honest.
i love how you track your own schemes...and how you're determining whether something is true, or not. its trickier than most realize, this questioning instead of staking a claim through beliefs. cut grass evokes freedom, like the long days of summer, and labor too.
welcome back, welcome fresh cut grass, welcome new awareness and decisions ahead..;ah the love, pain, beauty you expose..;the realness of fresh cut grass!
oh how i've missed the writings of you! keep speaking your truth.
Dweez -
Your post is amazing. Like your other yearning, waiting readers, I, too, have been poised for another entry. You are so good at this. The clarity and the subtlety both. The enormity and the small precisions of what "seeing" is really about. I love the journey you take us on, the observations you make, the vulnerabilities you expose. Thank goodness you're out there, paying attention.
There are lines here I want to remember, that need to be remembered. This, perhaps, one of the more naked, wordly truths: "His departure leaves me confronting my own loneliness and pain."
How fucking true is THAT?! That feeling of...well, it IS a kind of nakedness, an exposure, and an exposure of the things we'd rather not be exposed to. And yet, and yet, the very things we all need to rub shoulders with sometimes, just so we know, you know?, just so we see who we really are, so we don't blitz past our experiences and not see them as active choice we've made. I really believe some underneath thing, some invisible wisdom, guides us, even when we don't think we have it in us to decide stuff, I think some piece of us knows more, knows better, knows deeper.
Anyway, bless you. Bless you.
i am glad you are breathing deeply.
and i am flattered that you stopped by and enjoyed my flower petals.
continue to take care of you...cradle your well being.
you are an inspiration.
i am glad you are breathing deeply.
and i am flattered that you stopped by and enjoyed my flower petals.
continue to take care of you...cradle your well being.
you are an inspiration.
You are a miner with a heart of gold.
nice writing! how you can infuse such colorful buoyancy in a piece so full of story... so dense and compact... always amazes me. i rush to read it and then am sad i've reached the end so fast. and i learned something here... my favorite thing: scent perfumes and holds it all together. way cool. thanks!
Fresh cut grass reminds me of the black tresses of my girlhood friend, Valerie. And her sunkissed freckles and the way she made me laugh.
Youth and innocence. Simplicity. Happiness.
This is beautiful writing.
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