When is hilarity sublime?
I grew up in a family that always laughed at farts. You know, it was just a thing. And stuff like that might come up at the dinner table or anywhere. Of course, none of my brother’s wives or mine really appreciate that humor. But it is there nonetheless. In fact, I’m afraid I really offended my wife because I always like to tell her that God invented farts in order to show the world he had a sense of humor.
In any case, I was hiking a at the end of another long, hot, dry summer in Southern Oregon. It started to rain, a pretty good rain. And I’m hiking and hiking, concentrating on breathing through my nose, you know. And all of a sudden it hit me. And this hits me regularly as I hike at different times of the year. But generally after it rains or when it’s raining. So it has just finished raining and the sun comes out and it’s suddenly warm again. And I could smell the loam and the leaves from last fall. You know, all getting partially decomposed from last fall, but not really. And after the rain I just had this image of the fresh water having soaked into the ground. And all those microbes and bacteria munching away on all that vegetation and whatnot. And it suddenly occurred to me that the sublime smell I was smelling was zillions and zillions of farts.