Fragrant

 The olfactory sense gets the short end of the stick if you ask me; like being a faculty union president or the tech support for your company, it mainly gets noticed when there’s a screw-up, for instance, when you cut the cheese in the receiving line or have dog poop on your tennis shoes in the carpool to Little League.

Occasionally, though, the nose knows.  

When spring has really finally sprung, and the magnolia trees are heavy with flower and scent, and the Japanese cherry trees have exploded into white and pink blossoms all up and down the street, and Camellia bushes sport saucer-sized blooms for your nostrils to drink in as you ride by, that’s when smelling smells best.

Combine that with a waxing gibbous moon that grins the perfect Chesire cat grin in a sky that holds its crepuscular amber highlights well into Nautical Twilight above a quiet and tranquil Puget Sound, and you’ve got all the ingredients for a perfect evening out on two wheels, especially when combined with surely the best showing of old and newish-timers for a non tree-burning event in over a year.

There are familiar ways that become becomingly unfamiliar with the passage of at least twelve months: at times in the past, the route through the Forest Yoni salmon carcass sculpture could be dismissed as routine, but when the global pandemic has kept you from twisting and turning through the urban forest for so long, such relative mundanity seems as fresh and new as the spring air.

And besides, there were a few novel options, such as when as the typical energy of the archetypical Zodiac sign of the season led straight up a new hill, and led us all, eventually, to a brand-new firepit created on the spot in a literal depression, not the figurative one we’re used to of late.

And you know escape velocity's been achieved when the street light is snapped off; smells like victory!