August 17: The smell of August

[neverspent]

There's no smell like an August evening. It's predominantly the smell of sweet hay from the sun-burned grass. It's got notes of dust and insects and the things that eat insects. It smells like finely aged sunlight, really.

The summer I was seven, we moved here from the other side of an ocean. Alongside the bewilderment of heat and shale stones and pine needles, the wonder of scorpions and toads and unsupervised bike riding, the smell of deep summer is the thing I remember most.