mown hay should really be a perfume.

It really should. 

I would bottle that scent up and put it away for a December day, when I would take it out and smell golden fields while I sighed and watched the bleak grey landscape of winter out my window. 

It's summer. The golden time; the hay bale time; the season of blushing roses, straw hats, raspberry bushes plump with their harvest, and barefoot walks through waist-high wheat. There are flower seeds in our window sill, freckles on my nose, and sundresses dangling in the breeze on the cloths line. 

Meanwhile, thank-you notes are piled in the mailbox, and my graduation cap hangs in the closet to collect dust until I pull it out in the eve of life and remember that dream called youth. For yes, I am at long last graduated--and the days stretch before me like an entrance. Summer opens her arms, and I feel like jumping into them with "wild abandon."

But that sounds too poetic. I think my summer will be just as oxymoron-ic it always is: crazily quiet and hectically slow, tinted with the scent of freshly mown hay.