Breeze

This warm weather is getting to me. It smells like summer outside, especially at night. I have all the windows open, and the sheers are blowing in the breeze. I can smell rain coming, though it's still hours away. It reminds me of all the nights James and I spent in the house up on the hill in Greenfield, sitting on the floor eating dinner off the coffee table in front of the TV, with the windows and the front door open, listening through the screen door to the neighbors talking about nothing. I miss that time.

It's funny how every city has its own smell when it gets warm. I've spent four summers in Charlottesville now and they've all smelled the same, and I haven't quite figured out what it is. Boxwoods, honeysuckle, sweet hay and wet dirt — that's the closest I can get. Arlington smells more like grass and lilies. Pittsburgh doesn't have boxwoods, but does have arbor vitae, which smells similar enough to fool me sometimes, and something else that grows down in the Run that smells like honeysuckle, but incredibly pungent and sneeze-inducing. Seattle smells like spruce needles and wood mulch, in the spring, Bradford pears, which (go ahead, tell me I'm nuts) smell like corn tortillas to me.

I sleep so much better with the windows open that it's like a totally different activity than sleeping with the windows closed. I wake up more easily, too. I wonder if it's that the temperature change and the ambient noise clue my body in to the fact that it's morning before I actually wake up. In any case, I've got a brief due tomorrow that's going to need some early-morning revision, so I hope that the aforementioned rule holds true and I sleep well and awaken easily.