I *heart* conifers.

I just realized today how much I miss the Adirondacks and the way everything there smells like pine -- cool and green and fresh even on a hot summer day. We used to visit there pretty regularly for quite a few years when I was younger.

It's funny about smells and places -- each area of the country has a different smell. Virginia, which we also used to visit quite a lot when I was younger, smells like pine too, but in a different way. It's a combination of sun-warmed pine sap oozing out of the trees and the hot, dry scent of sandy earth and dead pine needles.

New York has that pine smell also -- but again, in a very different way. New York's pine scent is combined with the damp smell of rotting leaves and clay soil. So much of upstate New York is low, marshy ground, I think you can smell the evidence of that when you visit here. It's not a bad smell. It's just different.

I think the Adirondacks has the purest form of pine scent. It seems unadulterated with other smells. Maybe that area of the country isn't as polluted as the rest. Maybe, unlike downstate, it never gets warm enough during the short summers to rot vegetation. I don't know. It's all interesting stuff, though.

There's nothing like climbing a tree (admittedly, a very short and easy-to-climb tree) and basking in the sun during a warm day, eyes closed, breathing in the scent of pine in all its variety.