Breathing

I grew up in a beautiful place. A space that smelled of green and dirt after the rain washed the streets clean and the smog in the air was shoved away to give way for real air, breathable air.

We had very breathable air; in fact, it’s the most breathable air in the Nation, based on some poll somewhere. I long for that air when it’s hot and humid outside and my lungs scream at me because they remember the air that was so clean and full of the green from the trees that surrounded my little universe. Being in the middle of the nation during the summer, though I am grateful for my friends, etc., has proven to be quite the challenge, maybe it just sucks. Maybe it’s not a challenge at all. Maybe the challenge is to spend the time and money to get away from short stubby bushes they call trees here, and molehills they call mountains, and creeks they call rivers, and ponds they call lakes.

My wandering heart is in need of green majesty as it is every summer I spend away from it. The older I get, the more I find that my body literally aches for the terra of my birth. I look for the smell of water in the clouds here when it’s about to dump buckets of rain on us, my favorite part about the Midwest. Sometimes I’ll smell dirt just to see if I can be satisfied with the treated stuff they call soil. I walk barefoot through parks to feel if there is the “sticky” grass of my youth anywhere in my possible path. It always comes up short.

The long and short of it is, somehow God finds a way to weave the very material of nature into us while he’s weaving everything else that becomes who we are in our mother’s womb. Or maybe it just happened to me. I don’t know.