March: The month of my birth. A time where I often contemplate my origin. Who am I and where do I come from? What has made me into who I am? Times, places, and many people have made me who I am. This month is a time to look back, reminisce and explore those times, places and people.
Funny how a smell can take you back through time and to a different place.
I smell the grease as I pack the bearings of the front wheel of my 1961 Schwinn, but I am no longer in the bike shop now, but back in rural Wisconsin and in the spacious metal shed where my grandpa keeps all his tractors. I am no longer forty-five, but am now five years old again. Tools are scattered on the wooden workbench, and hung on the wall behind it. Some earthly smell mixed with grease mists the large space radiating from inside the long silver grease gun, engines and engine parts dispersed around the packed dirt floor. Without that grease, those tractors would no longer move and the operations of the farm would be cease.
Life when I was younger and in that special place was more simple and the memories of grandpa fixing things and taking me on early morning rides as he chopped the green dew moistened grass for the cows are just as rich and thick as that grease.
I miss my favorite farmer and I miss those simpler times. I love the time traveling scent as I now work with my own hands. Hands that now are dirty and slick, just like his thick hard-working calloused hands would be as he worked. We are forever family and memories keep those close to us alive.
