The Scents of Summer

By Brenda Buchanan

This time of year is one long olfactory system celebration.

You can fill your lungs with the sweet smell of a just-cut hayfield.

Huff the scent of ripe strawberries.

Stick your face right up close to a rosa rugosa bush (watch out for bees!) and inhale nature’s perfume.

It’s high summer in Maine, friends, and it sure smells good.

How can you not love the smell of a campfire?

Of chicken being grilled low and slow?

The salt on your skin following an after-work dip in the ocean?

A blessed sea breeze on a muggy day?

In June, July and August I sometimes feel like a black lab with my head out the window, gulping in all the smells that are mostly absent during the nine months between September and May.

Ozone after a big lightning storm.

Ice cream. (If you don’t think ice cream has a smell, your first job must have been doing something other than scooping cones for jillions of Little Leaguers who’d just won the big game.)

The well-oiled pocket of a baseball mitt.

Yes, some summer smells are to be endured.

The compost bucket when it sits too long on the counter.

The acrid stench of road paving.

A skunk going off in the middle of the night.

But those nose-wrinklers make the good ones all the sweeter.

Running over the mint patch with the mower.

Fried clams.

Coppertone.

Happy summer to all of you, and to your noses, too.

 What are your favorite summer smells and why? Please share in the comments. Backstory gets bonus points!

Brenda Buchanan is the author of the Joe Gale Mystery Series, featuring a diehard Maine newspaper reporter who covers the crime and courts beat. Three books—QUICK PIVOT, COVER STORY and TRUTH BEAT—are available through the Carina Press website, http:// carinapress.com and everywhere else quality ebooks are sold.