The smell of the end of the school year

I have just come back from a short walk with the dog. We just walked the path that I have walked every day to go back home after school when I was in high school. It’s a small path which crosses a field and which leads from the square where the bus from Grosseto lets people off in the village and my parents’ home.

While I was waiting for the dog to finish sniffing around and checking every single blade of grass that hasn’t already turned yellow under the sun of this warm spring, I smelled it: the smell of the end of the school year, the smell of the beginning of the summer holidays. Well, technically schools won’t close for another month, but the air already has “that smell” of grass and wild flowers and hay… of summer. And that means that the warm evenings are here, the long days have arrived, when you have plenty of time to finish your homework and still go out with your friends before dinner.

It’s funny how, for some people, memories and smells are interwoven. And the most fascinating thing is how they hit you all of a sudden, when you least expect it, and they bring back “things” you hadn’t thought of in a long time. Sometimes they bring about the awareness of things that you had never noticed before.

Today it was a bit like that: I had never realized that the smell of the wildflowers and the overgrown grass in the fields meant “almost the holidays” to me. It was a great feeling! I had the instinct to sit down on the grass and lay in the sun… of course I didn’t because my dog had already taken care of most of those patches of tall grass! LOL

BUT, now I am left with the desire to take my book and go read under an oak tree at my parents’ place in the countryside or to go have a picnic somewhere on Monte Amiata, on some lawn where I can walk on the grass with bare feet! Better start planning!