Aimee Gaberseck

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Scent Of The Season

In those first misty days shortly after the spring equinox, thirty-some degrees feels so good that you shed your winter layers and exult at the lightness of a hoodie as your only protection against the memory of frost stinging your skin.

The triumphant chorus of some hundred brave migrants pierces the long blank silence, enriching the crisp sterile air with their melodic voices and the promise of life again returning.

You stalk time-eroded trails as vapor flows in eddies around the bare trunks and branches and hushes the rustle of raindrops that wake the scent of last year's mouldering leaves. The white is grudging to relent and only reveals a muted sepia palate waiting for the colors of spring.

Hidden rivulets swell into a splashing torrent with the melting snows, cutting familiar paths and saturating soil until feet churn the way into a soupy morass that only the determined will pass.

But Under Armoured with Bogs boots and small threatening pick, you, steadfast Pennsylvanian, trek to the secret garden of spring's first offering. And even without the telltale emerald spears peeking above the forest mulch, you know where to sink your weapon into the crystalized icy soil to reap the reward of the most potent of the wild stinking root.

In a few weeks, with its pungent flags unfurled to signal that spring is finally here, others will trek these paths, winding and wearing them passable again in the annual ritual, trodding on its undesirable neighbor, the skunk cabbage, in order to savor the leek's attractive stink.

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