Saturday, June 29, 2013

Sweet Summer Air

Riding my bicycle to Crossfit Sua Sponte has become one of my daily rituals since I've been back in Raleigh. Until this morning, the weather has been mostly rainy, but today the sun has come forth and with it, the smells of summer. These are smells that cannot penetrate the confines of a car, even when cruising with the windows down. The flowers have burst forth, grass is getting cut, and even at 0920, there is a strong smell of BBQ wafting across the parking lot near the box. I wish I could actually ride with Dwight more often, so I could ask him about all the trees and test his memory on all the plant identification he's done years ago. I imagine the summer is easier when every tree has leaves and many of the flowers are at their fullest. Usually a cyclist is moving at a speed that allows for a good guess of the source of a particular smell. If I had my phone on me, I'd take a picture and later identify the source of the fragrance. I invite any of our readers who have found a particularly inviting smell to take a picture and post it to the page, to share a moment of their ride with the rest of us.
Even Susie likes to smell the flowers. These are gardenias.

2 comments:

  1. One of may favorite things about riding that you just can't get from a car, is hitting the pockets of warm and cool air as you ride along. I had a particularly vivid experience about a month ago riding up to the dam upstream of town. The bike path goes up a relatively narrow canyon, and almost every quarter mile I was in a new patch of air with its own temperature. It was unpredictable to me; no matter the pattern of sunlight or shadow on the ground or canyon walls, the temperature seemed to be doing its own thing. The smells of summer are likewise unpredictable but especially vivid while biking.

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  2. One of the best times while bike riding is in late winter / early spring on those first few warm nights. You can smell the earth coming back to life.

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