Yeah, right.

Summer in the Grand Tetons

This morning I stepped outside and it smelled like September. Even though it’s still August. Barely.

What does September smell like, you ask? Well, it smells like the anticipation of school and remembering that you haven’t done your literature assignment yet and shopping for notebooks and looking for that one, perfect backpack.

It also smells like (and this is the feeling that I always get) the college admission exams are in less than a week and you are still behind and you haven’t even read the chapter on World War II,  let alone memorize it like you’re supposed to in Romanian schools and what’s the point anyways, we now know that more than half of what was in those history books was fabricated and probably not true anyways or, at best, a very skewed, twisted interpretation of history.

September smells like the end of fun and the beginning of waking up at 7am because classes start at 8 and even though it’s 7:30 you’re still sitting on the edge of the bed staring into the air and unable to wake up. Somehow you make it to class, and wait for recess. Recess in our schools is every 50 minutes so the entire day feels like a series of 50 minutes with interruptions of 10 minutes in which you reconnect, you talk, you gossip and hope to see the boy in the Physics department and awkwardly exchange hi’s.

But more than anything, September smells like the summer is gone and what have you done to remember it? Gosh, I can’t believe summer is over…

I was at Yellowstone. A repeat visit, I’ve seen the park a few years ago and really, really enjoyed it.

It’s a strange thing when you’re there. You expect to see animals frolicking but you probably won’t for a while and then you see some tiny spots in the distance and you stop the car and pull out your long lens and try to get a blurry picture. After a while you see animals closer to the road and get more and more excited and then, all of a sudden, there’s a bear or a bull or an elk right beside your car and all those other pictures become laughable.

So this one time we see a buffalo on the side of the road and, of course, what usually happens, there’s a huge backup because everyone stops to take a look at the animals. So I get out of the car, since traffic is stopped, and run towards the bulls. I didn’t notice that, at the same time, the bull was running towards me. Yikes.

I finally see out of the corner of my eye this huge buffalo and stop just in time to see him cross the street right in front of me. This is one of the pictures I took. He was, well, big.