The windows are down and the hot air of summer is blasting into the car. It's sunny and the world is gently cooking under the early summer warmth. The freeway cuts through and around the hills covered in green canopies and fields of cattle. The early evening sun is glaring through the windshield at that awkward angle that's too low for the visor but too high to adjust your seat. The smell comes out of nowhere. Grassy, fresh, and dusty. The faint residue of diesel exhaust tangled in with the rest. Suddenly, I'm not on the freeway home from work anymore. I'm sitting next to the barn with a bottle of water and a sandwich. We're halfway done putting up this cutting of hay and we'll be working til dark to finish. Pop is sitting on the tractor under the umbrella shooing flies away with his broad straw hat. The barn is already full of the sweet warm smell of sun-dried bales. Grassy, fresh, and dusty. Pop is telling us about a time he had helped throw hay as a boy and gotten tangled up with a nest of yellow jackets. Us kids are listening as if it were a war story and a grand fight of good versus evil. Dust swirls lazily in the sunshine as the breeze blows it off the hay wagon. And then I'm driving along the freeway again. The smell of hay fields lingering just a bit longer before it's washed away.