Scents of Spring and Dirt

By |2023-02-26T07:44:05-06:00February 27th, 2023|A Writer's Life|3 Comments

Spring must seem lost for many of you who are buried under mountains of snow from blizzards. Down here where I live, the scents of spring are already in the air. Green sprouts dot bushes and trees and temperatures are pushing eighty degrees…in February!

judythemorgan.com We spent a day clearing winter’s carnage of dead leaves and pine needles from the flowerbeds and unlocked the pungent earthy aroma of the black earth. I inhaled the promise of spring’s colorful blooms as the scent of dirt filled my senses.

Memories floated in my head.

~Helping my grandmother weed her gardens.

~Making dirt mud pies and cakes for my siblings to sample.

~Planting seedpods so my children could watch a plant sprout and then produce something edible.

~Hiking in the woods with the pungent smell of years-old decaying leaves and stumps.

I still enjoy feeling dirt. The texture of lumpy clumps of rich, moist black dirt on my hands, with maybe an earthworm wiggling through. Powdery dirt flowing through my fingers when the ground is dry. Gritty dirt dying on my jeans after I’ve wiped my hands.

The earthy smells and memories make me smile.

This morning tiny tentacles of green, freed from all that weight, pushed upward through the dirt. There’ll be another wave of winter and the weeds will return, I’m sure, but today I see the promise of spring.

If you’re looking at snow, hang on spring will come. It always does.