
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: MONDAY, May 15, 1995                   TAG: 9505160012
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A-7   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: MONTY S. LEITCH
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

RAINY DAYS, DAMP NIGHTS

LAST WEEK, summer hit me while I was in Christiansburg. Late on a sultry afternoon, an apparently clear sky opened up and pelted down a shower of hot, bright rain. Steam rose off newly cut grass and sidewalks, and the smell of wet asphalt filled the air. With one deep breath, I was out of this too-cool spring of ours and right in the midst of summer: the kind of summer that marked my small-town childhood.

Because I live in the country now, and because I love where I live, I tend to think of myself as of-the-country. And because I played in fields and woods as a child, even in my small town, I tend to ``remember'' growing up in the country, too.

But last week, that deep breath of summery asphalt reminded me - assured me - that I am from a place of paved streets and cement sidewalks, a place where tar grows elastic under a hot sun, where rain splashes up as well as down.

That's where I'm from. Where am I now?

This question involves me a lot lately. A sure sign of midlife crisis, I'm told.

Early today, I walked my path in the woods. This year I've seen there more wild flowers than ever before.

``It's because the ice storms two years ago pruned out so many trees that there's more sunlight now.'' This is the opinion of the Man of the House.

Perhaps. Or perhaps it's merely that I'm looking more attentively, moving by more slowly.

This morning I made a list as I walked: dogwood, wild strawberries, violets blue and purple, wild mustard, poison ivy (of course!), Virginia creeper, giant thistles, three or four different kinds of ferns, wake robin trillium, raspberries, dewberries, blackberries, deerberries, two kinds of wintergreen, skunk cabbage, wild cherry, brook saxifrage, pink lady slippers, pipsessewa, false hellebore, wild geranium, galax, smilax, rosebay rhododendron, mint, mountain laurel, Indian cucumber root, wood lily, loosestrife, Solomon's seal, and fox grapes. A stretch of the path was also carpeted with the sweet-scented pink and white petals of apple blossoms.

That's what I recognized for sure. I also carried home a leaf and a sketch of a plant I've yet to find in any of my field guides.

So, this is where I am now: in a place of rich dirt and mossy mast, a place of mystery. A place sunnier than it was two years ago, a place without the smell of asphalt, even when it rains.

But not so far from home, I think, after all.

You will have noted that yesterday, Mother's Day, the moon filled. A full moon. In front of my house, the irises Mama gave me several years ago are heavy with purple blossoms. Sprigs that I took from her lilacs when I first moved here are now bushes 8 feet tall. Mama's lilacs were grown from sprigs of my grandmother's. It was Mama, too, who taught me to recognize lady slippers.

When the moon is full, I sometimes walk in the woods at night. The flowers are harder to spot then, of course. But the smells rise clear and strong. A breath of summer: rich and piney, damp, moldering. The warm, smoky smell of sweet decomposition.

Monty S. Leitch is a Roanoke Times & World-News columnist.

by CNB