At home, those currents are burned into my brain. There is a smell that accompanies summer. No, more than a smell. It comes from the air conditioners being switched on before they are warmed up, a brief electrical coolness that shudders down your spine and takes up residence in that space behind your nose and between your eyes and doesn’t precisely itch as much as it buzzes like a whiff of ozone-making you wrinkle your forehead and rub the bridge of your nose unconsciously.
That- that thing- it has been there as every spring changes into summer. I don’t look for it. It’s unexpected every time. But each time it comes I recognize it as what it is, an oracle of the shifting of the world. And suddenly, even though a moment before it was spring, now it is suddenly, irrevocably, summer.
I’m sure that these things exist here as well. I’m sure that there are signs at the changing of the seasons- much more than the shifting colors of the leaves or the mercury rising in a slender glass tube. Those unmentionable yet unforgettable moments that illustrate not only the passing of time but, in your very observation of them, your understanding of the world around you. A kind of resonance, a echo in your bones of the rotation of the world. A moment where you are in tune.
I’ve yet to learn the changes that underlie Seattle’s song. Perhaps it just takes time.