The Grass in Florida Canyon
I don’t remember rolling the window down, but I remember exactly where I was when I realized that my arm was resting in its absence. I was driving in Florida Canyon, right before the stoplight at the Navy Hospital, and the summery air hit me at once. The warm smell of cooling grass. But not grass from lawns, though the sound and smell of those being cut are as summery as it gets. This was the smell that sprawls sleepily across the Willamette Valley right before harvest, at the point in the summer when summer is all that’s ever existed. Pleasant and sweet, but partly just by association. Grapefruit Moon was playing in my car for the hundredth time this weekend and I was nostalgic for Saturday night and my teenage summers and my first months in South Park all at once. And disappointed that I’m the only one who knows what that feels like.