Grass. The smell of freshly mown grass came through her nostrils, filling her throat with a cold, scratching feeling that seemed painfully familiar. Laura rapidly moved the lawnmower forward and then rolled it back to the fence where her husband George usually put it as he liked it to be at hand. Her fingers were trembling from the intensive muscle work they’ve been put to, so she sat on the stairs closing her eyes to better focus on that smell of grass to remember where she had felt it before, wildly chasing the nostalgic sensations.
She managed to remember.
Guided by the memory shreds that have remained after her stroke, she suddenly appeared in the days spent in Wallonia, the southern region of Belgium; those dream-like days sodden with carelessness and tranquility when the sun blazed like old office lamps and the ever-traveling breeze spread the smell of the valley flowers just like a nomadic perfume merchant. It was so real, as if she could see it from a shop window. Not a mirror, but a shop window because she could see both herself and the actions taking place from aside, like in a glass reflection.
She opened her eyes, directing them to the rising sun to compare that morning’s color pallet with the ones she had previously seen since her first days in the village. It resembled the color of juicy July peaches that blushed under an unknown visitor’s gaze, being ashamed of their beauty. She didn’t get the chance to enjoy the view for a long time as the sunburned her eyes, punishing Laura for her attempts to evaluate its sunrise painting. But she managed to memorize that golden hue. She closed her eyes and painted the scenery over again with her memory, trying to compare it with the other sunrises she had seen from her first days spent in Belgium.
The decision had been made; she categorized the recent sunrise as the third runner-up after the one she saw the previous Wednesday and the one that the sun greeted her with the day she arrived in Clermont-sur-Berwinne, the biggest village of Wallonia.
She leaned towards the wooden partition and rubbed her hand over its rough surface, noticing the white crumbled paint falling on the well-trodden sandy road. A light wind rising from the direction of the field blew at that moment, shaking the long ears of wheat making them ripple like circles on water. Laura felt a slight tremble on her skin from the fluttering of her clothes and then noticed that the playful breeze was trying to steal her hat. She caught it up in the air before it was taken away by the wind’s gust, clutching it tightly in her hands. And then she felt it again, the fresh odor of the grass probably still with the morning dew tears on it. Insatiably breathing it in, Laura tried to find its source, moving her head around, when she finally saw him.
The smell came from the blue-eyed, tall gentlemen with dusty brown hair holding a bouquet of recently picked grape hyacinths with some grass blades. That was the first time she met Sebastian, the main editor of “Terra Incognita,” one of the most popular newspapers in Clermont. His blue eyes, complemented by the strokes of violet that the flowers in his hand uncovered, looked straight into hers, questioning something.
“You’re Laura Welchman, right?”
She got scared for a moment but then got relieved, remembering that Clermont was too much of a small village for its inhabitants not to notice a visit of a foreign journalist, that was moreover staying at the private guesthouse funded by the government.
“Yes…” she responded unsurely.
“Then, I need to tell you that the article you wrote for the parliament’s magazine was quite offensive. You’d better think before coming to Clermont when you’re writing that Wallonia is unwelcoming and flavorless.” He continued in a disgruntled but calm voice.
“I’m a journalist. I write what I see.”
“You see what your vision permits you to look at. And it doesn’t seem like you managed to see much. I doubt, however, that you’ll get the chance to see more of it in Clermont now that you had the audacity to hurt the feelings of the 3000 friendly people living there, each of whom would be more than happy to have shown you around.”, he took a pause. “Wait a minute! So that’s why you’re staying at the private hostel. You’re scared the villagers will choke you to death while you’re asleep?” he said, trying to hide his laughter.
She ignored that question, rolling her eyes, “At least I know for sure that the folk here don’t use pitchforks and torches.”
“You, Miss, have such an old-fashioned and poor perception of Wallonians… Pitchforks and torches, pfff, please. Villagers use rifles to exterminate the “monsters” that trample on their land. The question is, are you a monster too?
“No. I came to discover what Wallonia looks like.” Laura tried to justify herself.
“You know, I pity that you ended up noticing so little about my homeland that it made you think it’s unimpressive,” he uttered with indignation.
“I had that opinion before I visited Clermont.”, Laura said, gazing at him with attention.
That was the way they saw each other for the first time. To her, Sebastian seemed a discontented imaginary character from an impressionist painting. He reminded her of Van Gogh’s self-portraits, where he painted himself in exuberant colors surrounded by dream-like environments but always with a strict seriousness on his face. And Sebastian got the impression of her being stubborn and unprofessional at her job. But neither of them could take control over the spark that was lighting between them. It was a pleasant memory of a summer-long love relationship that seemed very distant from her current life because of her post-stroke syndromes that erased memories of her past like doodles from the margins of a notebook. She tried to catch those memories from the edges and pull herself into them to escape from reality, from her dull routine, from her wretched husband, in whose eyes she had to look every day, knowing that she didn’t love him the same way she did when they got married twenty years ago and from that damn suburban house detached from the colorful life around it. She wanted to bury her reality and her stroke-survived a withered and depleted self with it to continue her life as the younger Laura, that used to travel, fall in love with strangers and fight over her arguments. She didn’t have the energy for that now. Laura at least hoped she could preserve her memories about Wallonia to remember how she was in the past, but she was desperately losing them. The reflections in the shop windows faded away in the chaotic cognition damaged by her illness…
“Laura! Laura. Laura. Laura. Hey!”
George had apparently finished his job early and was now standing beside her, snapping his fingers near her ears to get her attention.
The thread had been cut off. She forgot it; the summer mornings’ beauty list, her article about Wallonia, Sebastian’s blue eyes that suited the grape hyacinths of the valleys and the smell of the Clermont’s fresh grass.
Sniffing the air, she, already disconnected from her thoughts, turned her face to George.
“What?”
