“Do you guys smell the plants?”

“You mean the flowers?”

“No, the plants. Can you notice that they smell differently than the plants back home?”

To be fair, I don’t think I was paying too much attention to the olfactory stimulation elicited by Virginia flora when I was a young teenager. My kids didn’t pick up on the comparison I was making. The backyard and forest greenery in Massachusetts does share a lot of the same general qualities as what we were walking through at the moment. But this morning was the perfect time to take in the smells of the various trees, bushes, and undergrowth.

It had rained. A cool, morning rain. The showers had subsided too early to impact the remainder of the day. Once the sun broke through the dissipating clouds, the warmth and humidity of a late-June day south of the Mason-Dixon had plenty of time to take hold. There is plenty to complain about there. However, the smells of the earth and the plants is not one of them.

Every time my family and I visit Northern Virginia, we’re outside. Walking, playing, running, and fishing. Outside, things are incredibly familiar. That is the case even I haven’t lived here in 20 years. Move away from the ponds and greenspaces and things are very, very, very different. The suburban sprawl has run across the landscape like kudzu. I’m more likely to get struck by  lightening than bump into a high school classmate. But what is outside seems to be untouched. Somehow the creeks and little lakes, tucked  into subdivisions and adjacent to preserved parcels, are thriving.

For equal parts nostalgia and doing it because it is what we do, we fish when we’re here.

Today my oldest and I fished the pond close to where I used to live. He was captivated by the idea that I could walk to a pond teeming with bluegill, bass, and catfish. As we cast, I pointed out places where I had caught fish. Places where I had fallen in. Places where the bus used to drop me off. He  asked what had changed and I was able to say not much. If anything, things were better. More riparian vegetation. More aeration in the form of fountains. More signs discouraging feeding the geese and keeping fish for consumption.

He could appreciate all of that. Conceptually, it makes sense. What he couldn’t get was the pulled-back from the recesses of the mind sensation of slick red clay from the morning rain underfoot. The nearly muscle memory ability to cast into a culvert. The smell of the cattails and mats of aquatic growth, thick from lawn fertilizer runoff.

We only fished for an hour. The week always holds more chances to cast.

Heading back to the car, I sent a picture of a well-proportioned bass to a high school friend. He’d get all the things I did if he were here. His day, it turns out, involved landing tarpon in the Gulf. After some congratulating and ogling, the conversation shifted back to the bass.

“It’s good to know that there are still fish there.”

It is. And it is good to know that on a summer afternoon it smells the same, too.