Scent of Spring

Yesterday I knew spring had truly arrived here in the northwest. It wasn't the birds twittering before dawn; it wasn't the tulips dotting neighbors' yards like so many wildly colored Easter eggs. It wasn't even the record-breaking 79 degree temperature. What announced the unequivocal arrival of spring was the first gentle whiff of the budding cottonwoods.

Call me slow, but it took me nearly two decades to identify the sweet scent that defines, for me, a Pacific Northwest spring. I guess it just never occurred to me that, in a region notorious for gray skies and endless rot-inducing moisture, the cottonwood tree could be responsible. Cottonwoods, in my mind, belong to arid lands--clumped around cattle tanks in Texas, edging sandbars on the floor of Utah's redrock canyons, snowing their fluffy seeds over the Kansas plains--not to the dripping realm of salmon and cedar. But two years ago, on a camping trip in Umtanum Canyon, just outside of Ellensburg, WA, I finally figured it out. Two species of trees, the Black Cottonwood and the Balsam Cottonwood, are quite common here; growing--as they do elsewhere--around streams, lakeshores and ponds. In April, when the trees unfold their buds, the tiny leaves are covered with a sweet-smelling resin. It is the scent of that resin that permeates everything about spring, including my dreams.

The books call it a 'balsam' scent. I have no idea what that means. It is sweet, as I've said, but not quite floral. There is an earthiness to it, an essence of organic, that brings to mind loam pushed up by emerging plants and grass freshly mown. Though carried everywhere on the breeze, it isn’t overwhelming like the plumes of bloom on the laurel hedge that divides my yard from the next. It is soft and warm; a gentle caress, a promise.

It is spring

And, oh! How I need it.

Photo: balsam root; winthrop, WA