Cool (March)

The city turns it on: test matches, tennis opens, white nights, grand prix. But the main event is beyond management. It happens without warning sometime in March. On no particular date turning trees, bay salt, breathing soil, old bricks, and a slight shower combine in a cool breeze across Melbourne. It strikes the neurons with one word, from the Old French, autumn. It’s a smell: most must mist. Not the same as the cool change that crosses town through any of the warm months. It’s the fall of summer. Some days I ask what was the Kulin for that ‘cool’?