From the inside, through my 1990’s shaded-design oval door window, it looked like recent Georgia sunsets: Cool, golden, breezy, comfortably worthy of a front-porch sit for a spell. I knew the frogs would be chirping and croaking and screeching melodically, there might be a whip-or-will or mocking bird or mourning dove singing joyfully at the setting sun, and various and sundry unidentified bugs would be rhytmically scraping and creeking and thrumming and whatever they do, lacing a deep-layered cacophony of sound like a grandmother’s old, well-worn quilt over the newly-mown hay and lawn and the soon-to-be-harvested gold-and-black-tassled corn in the field just beyond the broken-in-half hickory tree.

Surprise.

Stepping out onto the porch, the evening’s still, stiffling air laid on my face and arms like mold in a plastic bag full of what teenaged boys might call “garbage cheese” — not quite rotted into limberger, but still stenchy and pungent enough to make me want to avoid taking a deep, rich breath.

No breeze.

Instead, as I stood still and watched the sunset dapple through the aged oak and hickory trees, as I tried to revel in the natural symphony I’d expected, the damp-dank humid humors of the evening felt as if I was at the end of some God/Satan spraygun of tangible air-mist-grime-pollen. And no scents. Nothing to make breathing the languid vapors worthwhile. No sense of reward or joy or revelation. Just deep cotton-like vapors filling my nostrils and throat and lining my lungs.

I sat down anyway, rocked slowly the way one should on a Southern porch in late July, and waited for an evening breeze to come and wash away the fog-like depth of the moment so I could, at last, completely see-hear-taste-smell-feel-sense all-in-all around and through and in me.

And a distant owl hooted.

When unexpected/
nature clouds your mind, be still./
She’ll clear your senses.