secret fall moments
I once heard that smells associated with times and places stick with you longer than any other sense, and I totally believe it.When I was in junior high school I was on the football team. I was a pretty crappy football player for the same reasons that I will never be a CEO, which is that I'm a shitty team player.
Anyway, part of the deal is that we would go out on the field in our pads and stretch before the game to get ourselves limbered up. One thing you don't want when a bunch of homone-charged animals are trying to knock you over is stiff ligaments and tendons.
So there we would be on a fall thursday night. All of our parents were in the stands. The bright stadium lights cast shadows around us, only to be brightened by the next set of lights and so on, creating a starburst of faint shadows around everything.
We would form up in rows and stretch together. Some of the stretching required laying down on the ground, which is somewhat awkward with a helmet and facemask on, but it would present a strange picture of the grass inches from my face.
I would take a moment between stretches to just look at the grass and the dirt (my secret microcosm), as the families of the other players, as well as our own families, watched us stretch.
I wish I could now gather a couple of hundred people in a stadium on a fall evening to watch me lay on the freshly cut grass and stare at it through the bars of my facemask. It's a unique experience.
Whenever I smell that cut-grass smell on a fall evening, it brings those secret moments back.
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