Fragments From Floyd

This morning as we walked the dog around the pasture loop, we noticed that one of the grass species had "flowered" overnight. Its tall tassled inflorescences punctuated the field all around us like exclamation marks above the lesser grasses, white fleabanes, black-eyed susans and yellow clovers.

What especially caught my attention was the fact that each grass spike was spangled with countless tiny anthers that released a cloud of pollen at the slightest touch or breeze. I'd already told Ann as we walked out the door that I was determined to find the source of that mystery smell we've encountered now the past three summers, and we still don't know where it is coming from. I've described it as being "everywhere and nowhere present" and in quality as "almost sickening sweet" but oddly pleasant. We don't know what it is, but when it comes to the valley again for the first time in June, it is familiar and comfortable as an old friend, nostalgic as only remembered smells can be.

My theory has been that the smell comes from a wind-pollinated grass rather than an insect-pollinated flower (except possibly a high-blooming tree flower--basswood has been on the suspect list). When I shook the pollen from the spikey grass today and inhaled it, guess what: nothing. This isn't where the smell is coming from. I'll have to keep on sniffing.

Later in the day while picking wild black raspberries (no more than a yogurt cup full in the loop where we once would have picked a gallon) we found a common milkweed with some flowers beginning to open. Its mauve five-clawed flowers certainly give off a very sweet, almost too-sweet smell, but this plant is not abundant enough in our valley to create the inescapable perfume we walk through in early summer.

There is also a strong bit of this smell in the bark of the maples when the sap rises and oozes from sapsucker borings to blacken the bark with dilute "syrup" in the spring. But I have to put my nose right on the bark now to bring out any of that smell. So this can't be the source of the mystery aroma either. And I've been struck before by the smell of wild honey while walking the woods in years past when honeybees will still common. This everywhere smell is similar, but with a Bit-o-Honey overtone, if you can imagine that, and more cloying than honey, oily, almost oppressive in its omnipresence.

In time, I'll put my nose to some grass or weed, pollen or petals and have that moment of Eureka! discovery that will solve this fragrant puzzle. Curious. In a way, I'll be sad the day when I know. There will one less mystery and one more fact in my life. These days we have a surfeit of knowledge and it is too often the end of a thing. But wonder and curiousity send us out--looking up, turning rocks, scratching and sniffing, inhaling deeply--awed, receptive and ready for surprise.