The smell of warm bracken reminds me of my childhood, especially holidays in Wales. My parents would drive to some beauty spot, get out folding chairs and a camping stove, make and eat lunch, then sit back in their chairs, my father asleep, my mother reading.
I would wander off accompanied by a toy soldier, and in the thick dark green bracken on a hill side make a den. There I would sit, with the toy soldier on guard, and think up adventures, or merely daydream on important thoughts. When I eventually returned to the car my mother had usually joined my father in the land of sunshiny holiday nod.
I was never happier than when lost in daydreams, I resented school as you had to sit inside and concentrate on someone else’s thoughts, the teacher or some text book, and so I didn’t have the head space to roam about. At first I wasn’t keen on church for this reason, but then we moved from a quietly serious evangelical church to an enthusiastic evangelical church where nobody sat still or kept quiet, so I found I could think my own thoughts largely unnoticed.
The smell of warm bracken doesn’t just take me back to childhood, it makes me happy, I wish I could bottle the scent and use it as aftershave then go on my way in a merry daydream always.
Pictured: The land rising above Levisham Bottoms and the warm bracken that occasioned these thoughts.
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