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I walked home from school today sweating a little. It's the first day this year that if I didn't have a stapler tattooed on my arm, I could have gotten away with wearing a t-shirt to school. I got home and looked out my window at the exact scene that I would see when I looked out of that window six months ago. And it's strange. The emotions, or maybe the perceptions of emotions, that can come rushing back to awareness from where they've been tucked away since late last September. Ones that you can't be aware of the first time you experience, that can only be retrieved by certain sounds or odors, sitting poised on the brink of consciousness like some dream that you forgot to remember. The old men are back in their gardens outside my bedroom window. They're mixing manure in with the dry soil and burning off all the grass that died months ago when winter came and killed everything. Together it all smells alot like the cheap pot my dad would smoke when I was a kid. When they're not digging or burning, they walk leisurely, hands clasped politely behind their backs or they sit squatting down in small groups smoking cigarettes, not talking much. It reminds me somehow of part of an essay I read today about how when you lay on your back in the grass and you can smell the dirt and bugs underneath you and you can see the sky and the trees above you and you consider your own mortality, it doesn't seem all that scary. I've never tried it.