Our yard steeps in terrestrial smells with the slow crawl of a season.

This morning is wet soil and dark decay and rich mud along our fence line where my son tramps his path up and down and the builders who replaced our fence the week before dug or trod the last of our grass under.

Like notes in wine, the other smell is cedar pickets fresh sawn and wet under their first rain.

Through a month, two months more, rain will fall and mud will reign and then new growth. Grass will push up as plants of all kinds rise and crawl across the ground. The barren slick along the house will flourish. Lush green will prevail, potent grasses and persistent ivy, flowering shrubs and buds on the cherry and apple trees in back.

Until July with long, hot days and the cinnamon scent of dry needles, sap baked from branches. Days spent outside, shade trees whispering in warm wind that carries garden perfume and barbecue smoke across our neighborhood.

Trees fill out lush and flush for autumn. I have seen so many seasons on this block the full trees beginning their turn start to look like the larval stage of mud. Red-gold-orange-yellow leaves like paint daubs held smartly aloft, wrapped presents whose gifts are the very Earth.

Each time I step out the back door into scorching or frigid or misty air I feel it on my skin and breathe in the fragrance of a season.