The Scent of Green

So here we are...

I never thought I'd have a blog. Of course, I swore I'd never have a Facebook account, but I signed up for that a few weeks ago, too (thanks a lot, Jason). I always made fun of people who felt compelled to share their lives with the great anonymous Web and its tired-eyed denizens.

But as I accept the current facts of my life - namely, that my life is changing drastically (with my first child on the way in a matter of days), that our world is changing (in the wake of this current hubristic crisis), that I am so far away from my family and so many of my friends (it's official - today I received notice that Immigration Canada has approved my application for Permanent Residency, so I'll be staying for a while...so long, North Carolina) - well, I want a way to deal with those things, and talking through type is a way to do just that.

Maybe I'm just bored after six months of winter. I've looked at this white landscape long enough. I've already ordered all my seed for this year's garden, so I don't have that to distract me anymore.

There's this amazing thing that happens around this time of year in this northerly of a climate. One late winter day you'll wake up and there will be a different quality to the sunlight when you look out the window. And then you'll go outside and you'll feel a breeze coming from the south. And then you'll catch it - just this faint scent of something fresh, something normal, but something you've not smelled in a long time - the scent of green, the smell of plants somewhere farther south that aren't still covered in the snow you see all around you, the smell of spring. And then you know that this long winter will soon be over. This is something I never experienced growing up in North Carolina, but I look forward to it more than Christmas in my new Saskatchewan home.

And that yearning is part of the reason for the name of this silly blog, but it's not all. The scent of green is pretty important to me, in a few ways. Over the last few years I've begun to enjoy gardening, so much so that I've put plans in place to make a living farming. I've come to realize that helping the earth do what it does to help people do what they do is a pretty cool way of life, as a hobby or as a job. Some would very reasonably even consider it a vocation, a calling. But as I watch us humans do what we do I realize we have some pretty screwed up ideas about how all this is supposed to work, and about how it all did work for countless millenia before a few inventions over the last 150 years changed everything. But more on that later.

Those of you who know what it is to wave a crisp American dollar bill by your nose know another meaning of the scent of green, maybe the one which first registered when you saw the title of this little adventure in storytelling. I didn't choose this name because I like money, however, but because so much of what is going on in our world today is about the economy. Precisely, about how little "economy" we have left, buried under mountains of debt and greed and vain hope. I don't want this blog to devolve into nothing but my little soapbox, but I will talk about these things from time to time, and I'd love to have your opinions on these matters and on what I have to say about them.

And, lastly, to be my normal unwholesome self, the scent of green may very well call to mind the olfactory corollary to the sight of the inside of my soon-to-be-born child's diapers, but that imagery is only an unfortunate consequence of thinking too long too late at night about a title for my blog. It was strictly adolescently derivative and in no way played a part in the choice of my title. That's my disclaimer, likely the first of many you'll see here, since I can't seem to open my mouth without offending somebody.

I hope you'll enjoy keeping up with me here. I hope I can renew old friendships, maintain the ones I have, and come across some new ones with what I have to say here.

So, here's to this little journey of ours