hay fever......

ok, so this evening was one of the annual running events......held on or around the summer solstice......the twinkie run.......which has gone on for nearly 20 years......and no longer involves twinkies........it is a watchless......predict your time and then see how close you can come to your time without a timepiece........i don';t bother to take off my watch, because when one walks 3 miles (half the course) in 85 degree heat at 7:00 pm.......it doesn't really matter what i predicted, now does it....it only counts that i finish before i meltdown.......and so this particular evening.....as i was walking from the cemetary (the turnaround) to the church the start/finish.........i chanced to pass a farm that had newly bailed hay positioned near to the fence.......and the aroma of the mown grass took my breath away.....and took me back 40+ years.......to my grandfather's farm....and the barn full of newly bailed hay....arranged methodically in the mow...a.nd i thought of barn cats....and their kittens born in and amongst the hay bales.....and of my grandfather yelling at us kids to get out of his hay mow......and of my dad......well, that is the point when i started to cry......because my dad would have gone into a great diatribe about hay.....and whether it was alflfa hay, or timothy hay....or whatever combinations fo deliberately grown grasses versus just field growth cut and bundled.........and i missed my dad so terribly i could hardly breathe.......not from allergies......but from the raw emotion that scent cam evoke in the reminded brain.........