There is a smell the Groves make on the first warm rain of the year, and it is the one we all wait for. It comes up out of the ground the moment the drops touch it, dark and sweet and a little bitter, the smell of cold earth remembering that it is alive. You catch it strongest on the old paths under the canopy. I have never found the right word for it and I have stopped trying to. It is simply the smell of the woods opening their eyes, and every time I smell it my heart softens a little.

Then comes the blossom, which arrives on the wind before you ever see a single flower. The grove trees come into bloom high up where no one can reach, and the whole understory used to swim with it for a week or two, a pale, honeyed sweetness that drifts down through the branches and settles over everything. Walk the ridge paths at dusk and you will smell it before you smell your own supper cooking. The bees and the children come home with it caught in their hair. These days it is ever-present, which I think makes us all love it even more.

The third is the oldest smell of the three, and it lives in the black hearts of the great trees. Walk deep enough into the old growth and you will find it, the giants that fire hollowed out generations ago, and on a warm wet morning the char in them wakes. Resin and ash and something almost sweet beneath. It is the smell of a burn. It was how the ground got cleared and the cones cracked open and the whole forest made room for what came next. The old foresters had a saying, that you could smell spring in the old fire, and I have never smelled the one without the other. I will admit the scars have all gone cold now, and it has been a long time since I smelled a fresh one. But when it comes, I am a child again and the world is beginning…