Tomah

A scent of fresh mint adrift in air,
fields northward bound blown,
All surrounded, chilled and fresh,
how much fresher can free air be,
all full of fragrance flown.

Puffs of clouds,
early morning spring shower,
awash in pre sun rise hours,
coming over the full, lush, green woodland,
to the east and shining to the tops of the
western bluffs off Tomah way,

Gentle rolling farms, an easy land,
beautiful, bountiful as any on earth.
Cared and protected by families
for generations on down,
hearths and homesteads, small, tucked, tight,
valleys, fence row, back roads roll on.

Was this heaven?
Have I been sent back,
could one be so blessed?
Those early spring days when youth ran high and
life spanned endlessly beyond.

Those days, they marked me and
seared me with something God given,
never forgotten.
They held me and grip me to all dying days,
of a scent hung on the winds of time.