The smell hits you before you’ve crossed any real borders.
In the spring and summer, it is impossible to ignore the sweet breeze carried off the freshly plowed, mowed, and rolled fields that drift into your car vents.
You can’t help but shut your eyes and float for a moment, letting the heady mix of cut grass, fresh hay, pine sap, and traces of woodsmoke bounce off the mountainsides and waft through you, dulling your senses and loosening the tense muscles of your spine. You want to open your mouth while you inhale.You can’t help but taste the air, unpolluted, except for the exhausted puff of an occasional tractor.
As soon as you’ve reached the endless fields, you lose a headache you didn’t realize you’d been carrying since your last visit.
In the evenings, you can sit on thick pieces of slate, grass. Dandelions tickle your knees as you watch the sky erupt into a myriad of soft blues, burnt oranges, and colors you don’t know how to name as the sun sets behind the fuzzy outlines of distant mountain peaks. There is nothing obstructing the view, no vicious concrete structures puncturing the sky or planes that vomit smoke through the clouds.
You’ll stop watching the sun set long enough to gauge the reactions of those around you, finding the locals aren’t as enraptured with the display. Why should they be when they get the chance to experience it every night?
After sunset, there are more stars in the sky than you knew possible. It is silent. Silence like you have never known in suburbia. There is no whirr of engines or buzzing of power lines, no car radios passing by or murmuring voices of next door neighbors. You think to yourself, you should probably never leave.
But then you remember that it is only you out there, sitting in the dark, marveling at a sky that’s been above you all along. Your grandparents, locals as they are, went inside ages ago. You wonder if you might also get used to this one day if you stay. That thought is sobering.
Why would you want the beauty you just witnessed to become old news? Something expected and eventually ignored? What if your lungs become accustomed to the crisp air and that headache you get when you leave comes back anyway?
No, you think, I shouldn’t stay. I don’t want to stay. The Andes will always be there, nestled between mini-mountains at the heart of the Catskills. They will wait for my next visit.
