A MOUNTAIN VIEW: Just Breathe!

By LIZA FIELD

Lord, the air smells good today, straight from the mysterious inner courts of God. A grace like new clothes thrown across the garden, free medicine for everybody. Whatever came from Being is caught up in being, drunkenly forgetting the way back.

--Rumi

It’s that time of year when the landscape is a bakery of divine smells. A few come to mind. Ready to inhale?

Let’s begin with the pinestraw, matting a woodland trail, warmed with spots of sun and sending its sap-pierced incense upward, right into the nostrils, reviving even the dustiest tired hiker. As Shakespeare’s King Duncan pauses to exclaim, near MacBeth’s castle, such “air nimbly and sweetly recommends itself unto our gentle senses.”

It is indeed a regal feeling to pause and notice the fragrance of woodland floors, where last fall’s leaf-litter has partially decayed and partially baked into toast, radiating a spicy air difficult to describe.

Each morning, it begins expelling a dark, rich odor of roots and leaf-mold and mystery. By day, it’s a kind of sweet, dry bread-crust smell. By evening, the darkness draws deeper drafts up out of the cooling earth, and a camp-out here will intoxicate the sleeper with a lovely, ancient air that seems to respire between the worlds of life and death.

As long as we’re camping, we may as well get up early to start a small fire as light begins to crack open the sky, and add to the perfumery of good smells a bit of burning wood, the black oily odor of boiling coffee, stewed cook-apples, charred bacon and scab-burnt flapjacks to be drowned in syrup.

Back in town, we have fresh laundry-basket smells of sun-dried sheets and t-shirts to bless those lucky enough to own a clothesline. Here and throughout the county pastures, a similar sweetness of sun-dried grass and hay also gladden the heart. On humid, sticky days, honeysuckle and milkweed flowers flow their syrupy exhale down old alleys or roadsides or along vine-clobbered fences.

Then there’s the amazing, rich pungency of garden soil, rehydrated by hosewater, rain or dew, then warmed by sun. Here, you’ll also find the biting, snap-awake smell of the tomato plant. If you brush against one or even stare at it, the bristle-furred tomato plant seems to spit out this sharp fragrance which—who knows?—may be its particular language.

Back in the kitchen, you might cut open one of those sun-warmed, heavy red tomatoes and practically pass out from the divine draft of fresh tomato juice bleeding onto the plate. Plunk a wet slab onto some bread, add some air-piercing ground peppercorns, and before it quite reaches your mouth, you’ve had another inhalation of summer euphoria.

Then there’s watermelon. Similar to the smell of a just-cut, glacial-green-white cucumber, the watermelon fragrance is sweeter and almost surreal, like a vast cool pink flower you have plunged your face into.

Cutting open a peach brings a sunnier, syrup-like air into the world, a warm exhale from some golden heaven full of lights and kindness and gone generations of grandmothers in aprons who made pie.

Yes, the pie! We had to find our way to the steams of summer pie, one way or another, and since we have already mentioned peaches, we may as well plunge bodily into the blackberry cobbler, pulled straight out of the oven on a day too-hot-to-cook, and positioned among old hotpads on a flat board, like a sunbeaten sandcastle full of black, mysterious, exhaling holes.

Who invented such a strange, wonderful entity as the blackberry cobbler, and how can we not feel enraptured by an earth and a Creator who allowed such an event to happen?

And how better to celebrate this salt-gritty-crusted, sweet-sour-syruped, compact-but-sloppy gift of the earth than to sit around after supper, dwelling on some shoveled-out portions of this mess, topped with vanilla ice-cream that melts into a purplish cloud and lends its heaven to the ancient dish?

Afterwards, walking a dirt road, you can smell the other sweet odors expiring out of the cooling cobbler of the darkening earth. Riverbanks and cow-ponds, mown hay and hickory groves, creek hollows and rhododendrons—the whole deep, complex expression of a-day-on-earth uplifting the fireflies and your face toward the trail of stars, in that abyss between the black trees.

And you might think, Lord. Thank you so much for letting me be your guest, floating through fathomless dark space on this rare globe, where the very dirt exhales your goodness and flowers—so unthinkably!—into originality, color, sweetness, and intoxicating fragrance. Thank you for allowing me to inhale a lifetime of so much loveliness. Help me, then, to exhale praise and a life that honors your presence here and brings goodness to all other creatures.

Liza Field is a hiker, teacher and conservationist in Wythe County.
Write her at .