where the windows are breathing in the light...

I'm writing this while I sit in my bedroom windowsill... legs dangling out on the roof, feet soaking up the last of the warmth from the shingles, leaning against the window frame watching the sun sink lower and listening to the Cinematic Orchestra.

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I love the smell of earth thawing. Almost every spring, I can recall the first moment that I walk outside and for the first time that year year, smell the earth thaw. My very first memory of this moment was when I was about 8 or 9 maybe and on a break from school and we were in the middle of a good Chinook look it up here. My mom and I went through the pasture and ditches along our farm in sweaters and rubber boots and stomped through the thin layer of ice covering all the puddles. I think it was one of my favourite days ever. I remember though, there was this moment. In the ditch at the end of driveway on our way back to the house. My mom had climbed up onto the driveway and I was standing in front of the last puddle left to crack. When I lifted up my boot to step on the ice, I smelled it. That scent that is impossible to describe...that earth thaw.

Last year, I was unemployed and though locked in for another year of landscaping, had yet to begin. It was early in the afternoon and I was walking behind the Saville Sports Center...actually more like slipping over the ice in the field behind the Saville. I was on no particular mission, no real agenda, just filling up time and soaking in the sun on a beautiful almost spring day. As I slid down a hill of yet to be melted snow at the back of the parking lot, I smelled it. That moment, that second where everything whips around you while you stand still and just feel....connected to everything, to the change in nature to the wind on your face and the dirt under your feet and the sun in your hair.

It's no secret that I love summer. The heat and the long days and the physical labour that I tend to associate with it makes me wish it would never end. But there is also something about the transition seasons...I don't really consider Spring and Autumn to be full seasons because I've never lived in a place where they seem to last for more than a week or two. But there is an energy about them. An energy in spring that, for me, is caught up in that smell of thaw. As with everything in nature, I associate everything with wind.

This afternoon, I was biking through some rather large puddles on the farm and getting absolutely soaked. There was enough wind that I was starting to get a little chilled and so turned my bike around for home and in that moment, that second when I turned my tires back to the house, I could smell it. And not just smell it, but feel it and taste it...earth thawing. And I know with the spring weather we've been having that it has been thawing for a week or so now, but I'm talking about that definitive moment, that breach in reality where everything is at once only existing as energy and light and you are not a single observer of it but lost within it...a million pieces fragmented into the wind and sun and soil.

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That Home

Where the doors are moaning all day long,
Where the stairs are leaning dusk 'till dawn,

Where the windows are breathing in the light,
Where the rooms are a collection of our lives,

This is a place where I don't feel alone
This is a place that I call my home...

- The Cinematic Orchestra

listen to it here