The Sounds and Feelings of Springtime

The human mind is a supercomputer. It stores a lifetime of memories, feelings, scents, sounds, songs we’ve heard, pain we have felt – and more. You can forget about something for decades – a lifetime – and there will be sound, a smell, music, a nerve twitch, an itch, phantom pain, or a sunrise that ignites a memory.

Why does a song suddenly pop into your head – known as an “ear worm” – you haven’t heard in years – and then you cannot get it out of your head? Or, what about a childhood memory? I was sitting here at the PC the other morning, listening to the din of power lawnmowers when I picked up the scent of fresh cut grass and the feeling of humidity in the air and I was suddenly five years-old again.

How does an experience from 65 years ago suddenly emerge with the sound of lawnmowers, an aroma, and a feeling in the air? And – from a place so unlike California? This experience drifted through an open window, jolting me from the focus of writing an automotive technical article.

It hit me like a thunder clap.

My dad pushing a budget-priced, hardware store power mower in the spring of 1967. When I was old enough, the job became mine along with the memories.

I’ve been living in the California desert for 32 years. I grew up in the Mid-Atlantic where those first days of spring were euphoric – that annual arrival of mild weather and an unmatched feeling of liberation from the sound of a furnace and the haunting wanderlust desire known as cabin fever.

You cannot wait to get outside and take in the spring.

It just isn’t that way in California. California’s desert climate is cyclic year-round due to the influence of the vast Pacific. It can be chilly one day and 100+ the next. Springtime here is so vastly different than the East Coast.

I think of the sound of Blue Jays, crickets, the hammer of woodpeckers, the harmony of honeybees, the hoot of an owl, the rumble of distant thunder, and the dead silence of a heavy snow and I think of those long-forgotten childhood memories. In the latter of my life, these memories remain fresh.