Thursday, March 29, 2018

Fresh, Yo

It's late March in North Texas. Last night was cool and pleasant, so before I went to bed I opened my bedroom window a few inches.

But this morning, I completely forgot that I had done that. So my bedroom window was open all day. Which is not a big deal safety-wise, as I live on the fourth floor. But it was kind of an almost-senior moment, because who forgets they opened a window??

Or maybe it's God's fault. THANKS, MAN.

In any event, when I got home from work...

...oh my window-cracking-God, work was a hot mess today. When are you people going to start buying the book I haven't written yet and make me a millionaire?...

...when I got home from work, the very first thing I noticed was that the apartment smelled funny. Not bad. Just...funny. Different. My apartment, truth be told, frequently smells like last night's dinner or litter box funk or "ooh I forgot to run the garbage disposal." What I smelled was none of those.

I decided to congratulate myself that the house cleaning I'd done the night before had actually done some good, and forgot about it.

Just now I went into my bedroom and realized that it seemed...loud. Like, I could hear traffic and the swimming pool and the construction noise next door much more clearly than usual.

And then I realized that one of my windows was open.

And it hit me.

That funny smell? The one that wafted to me the second I unlocked my front door?

That was the smell of freaking fresh air.

Look, in Texas there are three seasons: Too hot to open the windows, too cold to open the windows, and a few brief, magical interludes when it's the perfect temperature to open the windows.

In Texas, we call fresh air "Nature's Febreze."

Those magical interludes literally total about four weeks out of the entire year. It's no wonder we dwellers of Hell the Lone Star State aren't intimately familiar with how they feel...or smell.

But yeah, suddenly it all makes sense.

My little apartment home smells like...Spring.

Way, way better than this.
And now that I've realized how wonderful it is to breathe fresh air, I'm going to leave my window open until the moment it's time to have the air conditioning on 24/7.

So, mid-April, if I'm lucky.

Air, you guys.

Sweet.

2 comments:

  1. I've written about the four or five days in Texas each year when I can open the windows. Actually, I do it more than that, but I don't generally feel the cold, so this winter was great.

    The AC is going to have to be going constantly in the next few days, or in a couple weeks at most. But for now, at least in the dead of night, I can still crack open a window. It's amazing.

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  2. It's one of my eccentricities that I will keep the windows open long after the weather makes doing so intolerable. This is mainly because I find the sounds of nature lull me into a pleasant sleep, although "Children of the night, what music they make" loses some of its impact when talking about crickets.
    And I've been on camping trips where the katydids were so loud I wished my tent had a window I could close.

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