Big Man to the Rescue

Again, blogging mostly in my head with a promise to write a couple of times a week. I went so far as to follow @AdvicetoWriters on Twitter, and many of the quotes from famous authors inspire me. Pretty soon, I hope to act on this inspiration.

Last week, I was walking down a street near my house that I’ve walked down many times. It was a hot muggy day, made worse by a recent rain. I was cranky. It just hadn’t been a good day on many fronts, and it felt like one of those days where nothing was ever going to go right again. I try to live positively, not because it sounds like some catchphrase, but because I think it’s good for my health and those around me. But some days, I'm not very good at it.

On this cranky day, I was crankily crabbing my way down the street when I literally (and yes, I know how to use this word) stopped in my tracks. It was the smell. There was a pink-blooming mimosa tree, one like had been in our backyard growing up on Willow Glen. In that second, I was transported to about 1967 and transfixed by that smell. In that place, I smelled the “playhouse” that my dad built next to the pink-blooming mimosa tree in the backyard. Truth be told, it wasn’t exactly a playhouse, but more of a big wooden shed where my dad kept his lawnmower and tools and lawn chairs and stuff. But I commandeered part of it as a playhouse.

It had one single double-hung window on one side and opposite that, a dutch door that I thought was the most exotic thing I'd ever seen. I thought my dad was the absolute trickiest man in the world for building that shed. Sometimes, my mom would let us eat lunch out there, sitting in lawnchairs, balancing our tunafish sandwiches and Golden Age grape soda on our laps. We played in it for hours, even on rainy days.

It wasn’t the cleanest place in the world, but I didn’t care. There was sand or mud on the floor, along with the lawnmower tracks. There were the inevitable chinaberries and mimosa flowers blown under the door. (Now that I think about it, there were probably lizards in there.)

It smelled like wood. It smelled damp and musty all the time. It smelled of cut grass stuck in the blades of the lawnmower, and it smelled faintly of gasoline. But it also smelled like that damp, fragrant mimosa tree, a smell I hadn’t smelled in decades.

I just stood there, breathing in that smell and all those others my brain had somehow suddenly released. My bad day vanished.

The late, great Clarence Clemons said, “The universe gives you what you need; you just have to be there to accept it.”