The sun still visible high in the sky for another few hours.
I now smell the trees and bushes, the urine in the woods, the smell of the liquid soap you used to have in your apartment in university.
Riding on:
Another scent: the smell of your mother’s kitchen and the flowers she had at the table the last time I was there.
I can smell far off lilacs on the wind which blows up willows all along the trail and collects on its sides where the grass catches it on its path to spread life.
It floats on the air, rhythmic lines on a sheet of music, gets in my nose and tickles it, gets caught in my freshly clipped hair giving resistance to the air as I ride along.
Children on their bikes pointing at me and speaking as I speed by, inaudible but I smile and nod to the parents - unfamiliar with the polite Newfoundland gesture - as I pass, unthreateningly.
Riding on I smell of the yards I walked past on August afternoons in St. John’s and my Mother’s eucalyptus flower display.
I pass the mill and the sound of its mighty machinery picking from the vast piles of logs that arrive there each day by overburdened logging trucks and its sleepy drivers. Now the smell of the freshly cut logs, one if my favourite smells. When driving I often roll down my car window and invite in as I drive past it on the road. Each time it fills my vehicle with the pleasant smell of freshly cut wood and the oils in the grain. Just a pleasure to witness.
Then the peculiar sign - Livestock grazing project in progress. This is all too evident when I catch the smell of horse manure the best smelling of all manure. If there were a choice I'd say horse manure is the least upsetting. In fact I don't mind the smell of it at all. Then my nose comes across one of the smells of my childhood, the unmistakable stench of cow manure, so strong at times I swear it clears my nasal passage. My grand parents were cattle farmers and produced milk as well, so I'm very familiar with the unmistakable stench of cow's manure.
On past the old railroad bridge and the smell of creosote which has dripped down it's sides and now years past its usefulness, its only good enough to be used as a pedestrian bridge.
Riding back I catch the smell of your mother’s kitchen, which I attribute to the hand soap next to the sink of which this path smells a lot like.
Again I pass the smell of deciduous trees and decaying humus. The likes of which transport me back to fall days as a youngster and my early teenage summers growing up in Ontario.
I pass two guys and a girl, each with an overpriced venti sized coffee in hand, doing so: to be urbane no doubt, walking along the trails of this city discussing their proposed intellectual pursuits; and this being amongst the firsts time they’ve recognized - they like to hear themselves talk.
The air around her smelling of cheap perfume.
The kind you get when you realize other girls in school are wearing perfume and you do so just so you fit in. The kind of perfume you purchase before your sophistication for such things has evolved. The stuff that you think smells good - but doesn’t to others - and years from now you laugh at your own insouciant attempt at early adult vanity.
