Pines

My eyes are closed.  I'm still squinting.  I'm trying to create and image in my mind.  I want to remember the entire experience, sounds, colours, feel and smell, especially the smell.  I can block out the soft music playing where I am.  I can replace it with the songs of a few birds.  I can slowly bring an image into my mind, generic forrest, with green tops and reddish brown bottoms. The green isn't solid it's made up of thousands, maybe millions of individual leaves of various shades of green or brown or grey or combination of the three.  Each leaf is too small for me to see from my vantage point in the image I am creating around me, but if I try I can see with a clarity that I don't have in real life.  I can see the variation is also in the bark of the pine tree trunks and the forrest floor which.  The part I really want to get to though is remembering the smell of the hot pine needles that I can now see all around me.  I can feel them cushioning each step and sway.  I can hear the needles as they rub together under my weight, well almost.  With my eyes still closed I look up and the darkness slowly reveals the dappled canopy above me.  I'm standing close to a big trunk and above my head the tree's branches radiate and spiral upwards.  The sky is light blue, where it can be seen through the dark needles.  I think I saw a bird flit away as I look up.  I can now hear the wind pushing the branches together, it makes me inhale.  I feel the heat around me and there it is, it fills my nose and lungs, the warm pine aroma.  It means it's too hot to spend time in the sun.  Too hot to do much except stay still and be surrounded by trees and leaves.

It's not too hot out side my imagination, outside it's snowing and below zero by a fair amount, it's -16C.  This cold is also beautiful but it's not like the smell of a stand of pines on a hot day.