It’s hard to say which season I like the best in south Louisiana, but right now I think it might be spring. It is never summer, a time of swarming termites, mosquito bites, massive roaches braving the daylight, and suffocating heat and humidity. It’s sometimes fall, but it gets dark so early. On the other hand, the heat is finally letting up, the evenings occasionally get crisp, and Indian food is again an option for a dinner out. Everyone looks forward to winter in New Orleans, at least until winter actually arrives. Winter is nice because of the snuggling and the cozy sweaters, but when your apartment doesn’t necessarily have a heater, the cold can be evil. Even in south Louisiana.

But yesterday, spring became my favorite season, while Polly and I were running around the neighborhood in perfectly glorious weather (unseasonably cool, actually, but who’s counting?) with a cloudless blue sky at 6:30 in the evening and darkness still a way off. I could really smell the sweet olive, one of my favorite smells in the world. (After “bakery” smell, naturally.) It’s just so bittersweet, knowing that summer is just around the corner, and not in a good way.

My sense of smell is so much better now. I figure this is my first spring in probably 12 years that I have been really and truly smoke-free. It may surprise, shock, and disgust some, but I have pretty much continued to smoke off and on since I started running. (Well, actually, since I was seventeen and at boarding school and my friend Gretchen convinced me to try a Camel Light on the hill on the side of the dorm. Yeah, she quit smoking years ago.

But I haven’t been a pack-a-day smoker since the summer of 2001, when I quit for the first time. For about nine months, I was a very light smoker. It was my first time “quitting”. But back then, I thought that cheating was okay. The reason I quit was to train for the London Marathon, and for the most part I did okay. And then ask me how I celebrated the end of the marathon – at the pub that evening, of course I hit my friend Michael up for a cigarette.

Then it was pretty much downhill from there. I never smoked quite as much after April 2002 as I did before I “quit”, but I still smoked. I could go a week without smoking, but I rarely did. I did smoke a pack a day on occasion, but not regularly. I trained for the Marine Corps Marathon while smoking. (Not literally.) But I’d abstain the night before a long run and then buy cigarettes on the way home from the run. Pathetic. I never really felt like a real runner while training for that marathon because of all the smoking. Sigh.

But then Kristina told me in January that she was going to quit smoking, and I thought to myself, I can do this. And I did. Well, with the assistance of the nicotine patch. I don’t have that much willpower! And Kristina did too. And she was a much heavier smoker than I was. And so did Anne (who is training for a marathon now, and I worry she will end up like me, celebrating the end of the race with a cigarette. But I hope not.) The three of us spent our six months in London smoking packs and packs of cigarettes, and it’s always been one of those things we do together. So I guess it’s only fitting that we quit smoking together.

So it’s now been 73 days without a single cigarette. And that’s the way it’s going to stay. No cheating – not a single solitary cigarette. Not a puff, not a drag, nothing. It’s the only way to do it, I know that now. And I have to say, joining Weight Watchers was probably the best thing I could have done to help me keep my mind off smoking. It was hard enough to figure out what I could and couldn’t eat that smoking just completely flew out of my mind.

So yay to Kristina and Annie and myself for the past 73 days! And yay to smelling the sweet olive!