To New Mexico with Love: Part VI

Ahhhh...lilacs.
Wysteria.
Spring.
After the longest, most beautiful, snow-kissed, glistening winter I'd ever experienced, Spring walked in with the grace of a 1920s Hollywood starlet.
Subtle but definitely noticeable.
Noticed.
Sweet.
Fresh.

Next to me in this rugged cafe near the corner of Coxe and Patton in Asheville, two 20-somethings contemplate geometry...non-Euclidean geometry...and I swear I am in the coffee shop on campus at St. John's college....

That spring I wandered farther and farther from campus, up and down muddy roads that dead-ended at streams and homes built by Frank Lloyd Wright or Juan c de Baca....

There was nothing familiar about the land but it called me deeper and deeper into itself, and I found respite there. Serving as cushion-y juxtaposition to the rugged land was the sweet scent of the air. Like the Sirens luring Odysseus, the lilac-scented air compelled me forward.

Scent being the most primal of our senses etches memory like a surgeon with a scalpal. I fell under the spell and hand of divine olfactory exactitude...what the hell does that mean?

It means this: everything else fell away. I followed my nose....and in this way, I learned about that place. And yes, this is the second way I fell in love with New Mexico. I fell in love with her scent. And I will never forget it. Thank god.

After living in Santa Fe for those decades that opened me to the power of scent, I now swear I was a bumble bee in a former life.

So here's to having been a bumble bee in yesterday's life.

The scents here are more subtle. I haven't found the ones that bowl me over yet. Right now, it is still the blue haze of the Blue Ridge at sundown that has me mesmerized. Layers of mountain peaks each a paler blue than the one in front of it look like an air-brushed movie back-drop. I can't believe it really. They are just as they are named....And I thank the people that walked before me and named the land so appropriately so that I can always know just where I am....Just like the Sangres...the dried-blood-red mountains of the lower Rockies...I always knew where I was.

It's nice to keep it that simple when life has me chasing my tail in many ways with work, errands, and sports teams; I can stop, and look, and know just where I am.