Stirring My Senses

Across the road from Hazeldell Orchards, Kelowna, BC

There is something about each of us that is spontaneous. Five somethings. Our five senses. 
Reading my journals from 2006, I found an unedited writing assignment. We were to write a 300 word short story about the five senses with an autumn theme. I have a few more than 300 words! Closer to 570 words! And I'm pretty sure I didn't get all five senses. Never the less, here is my creative non-fiction:

Stirring My Senses

“The road had been long. It was dusk. I was almost at my destination and in the unfamiliar terrain of low mountains. I had crossed the United States from North Texas into Western Canada and through a variety of mountain ranges. The Gaudalupes in Southwest Texas, the Eastern Rockies and now the Western Rockies crossing the United States/Canada border. I had been driving into Canada for only a few hours at the end of a long day at the end of a long trip home. I was changing homes to come my home country to the foreign province of British Columbia. My window was rolled down - the only air conditioning in my old car. Something stirred my senses. Gathering dusk had blackend the surrounding terrain although I could see a vast low forest of trees around me. I was glad the highway was wide and paved. Being used to, for the last fifty years, the open Saskatchewan prairies and LLano Estacado plains, this was one part of the trip that had been quite uncomfortable to me. Yet the air in the window was cool and fresh. Different somehow. It was not the smell of prarire dirt or highway asphalt or new mown hay. I didn’t recognize the fresh aroma wafting into the car. I felt awake and rejuvenated.

*****

And there they were. Bins of apples and pears. Wendy had asked that I help her with her fruitstand as her mother was not able to help out this year. I loved the thought of being on a farm again at harvest time. Just then the old blue Fordson tractor swung around the corner from the orchard carrying another bin of striped red apples on it’s outstretched iron arms. Once the bin  was lowered carefully into place and lined up, I set to work. Apples! Gala apples this time. Small, red and cream striped with dimpled bottoms. Picking one up to check for bruises and other anomalies, I leaned forward into the bin. Something stirred in my memory. I filled the box in front of me, culling out any barely imperfect apples leaving  only the most perfect for my box. The next step was to put the just packed box away in the big cooler at the front of the fruit stand. It was already crammed with boxes of the fresh picked fruit, I picked up the twenty pound box and followed my boss, Wendy, outside to a second larger cooler waiting to be filled. Opening the door, a rush of cold, aromatic air completely loosened the stuck memory. I was back on the highway driving through apple orchards. Orchards that stretched through the Okanagan Valley as far as the eye could see except for the chunks of land stripped and replanted with pavement and shopping malls, homes and schools. 

At that moment I knew what had been missing from my life for so long. The outside. Growing and harvesting. Friends and family living, loving and working on farms. Falling exhausted at the end of the busy day on the land. Meeting only the deadlines that the natural world sets. Each time I smell, touch, taste an apple or pear, it brings me from the mountains to my prairie home and I am glad. And so this piece of my journey back to self is a memory told by my senses. If I deny my senses, I deny myself."

“Nothing revives the past so completely 

as a smell that was once associated with it.”

~ Vladimir Nabokov