Every season has its smell, its olfactory power, so that when you recall it, senses wake up: the taste of fresh baked sugar cookies mixed with pine from the live tree in the corner; the warmth of burning leaves and the cloying sweetness of maple syrup in the Fall; the enlivening beauty and fragrance of a patch of Springtime wildflowers……and then there’s Summer.
The large field behind the Wagon Wheel Playhouse, Warsaw, Indiana, grass newly cut into hay so that all you smell is that green watery grassy perfume, so alive it feels like yesterday …..my sweaty exhausted body from the very hot day-long dance rehearsals, that first sip of cold gin and tonic iced to perfection mixed with the drugstore aftershave clinging to the trumpet players neck…the smell of Emerson Scott, my summertime romance for four consecutive seasons his rough trumpet-playing lips moist and chilly from our shared cocktail….the feel of his muscular body, the taste of his tongue, the bliss of the cushiony grass beneath us, and the heat…the smell of the summertime heat…mixed with scene paint fumes wafting over from the scene shop….summer smells like……..well….summer smells like no other time of year….summer smells like pancake stage makeup and sex, durable cheap
lipsticks and waterproof mascara….summer smells like Emerson Scott…so much so, that I will never forget his blond, Mid-Western handsomeness, his glasses fogging when we kissed, and his capable, wonderful fingers….i am his instrument for those summers, and when he is not in the pit playing a performance, he is in my bed of grass and freshly washed sheets playing me like a well-loved horn….my summer of trumpets.
I was brassy.