petrichor (PET-ri-kuhr) noun

The pleasant smell that accompanies the first rain after a dry spell.

What a cool word! I didn't know there was a word for such a thing and it's like meeting an old friend for the first time to find it.

Now it's sister word would be the one that names the smell of rain in the air before it starts falling. I do love that smell.

I remember being puzzled by it as a child. I'd hear my grandmother say, "Oh, I smell rain." And I'd sniff at the air and wonder what on earth she was talking about. It was the same with humidity. "My it's sticky today, so humid!" and I should have asked what she meant. Or perhaps I did and she didn't have the time or the words to help me understand.

But I learned. I wish I could remember when, and what breaks that line between understanding an abstract concept and being lost in the dark. I watched the same thing happen with Abe in math. One day he just couldn't wrap his mind around what I was trying to explain. We'd play with the manipulatives and talk about addition and he could do that just fine, but sit a work sheet in front of him with the manipulatives translated into numbers and he was lost. I couldn't understand it. At times I thought he was just being stubborn and wasn't going to do what he didn't want to do. But now I have an understanding born from memory.

I learned a lot about the world around me when we moved to Oklahoma. I didn't pay much attention to the sky in Pennsylvania, or clouds, or the way the air felt. Perhaps it was more a function of age than anything. Or perhaps that it was all so familiar. Not many people are compelled to study the familiar, sadly enough. Oklahoma was so very different. So open--both the landscape and the people. There wasn't a busy highway out in front of the house, or people who had just moved in from Philadelphia that made all the neighbors talk and lock doors more often. In Oklahoma there were haybarns and ponies. Cattleguards! How we got a kick out of singing while we drove over the cattleguard! And then there are those long dry spells when all the adults, especially the farmers, wear a taut worried look, and look up at the sky in search of a hope or a promise. I do believe it is there that I first smelled rain on the air, and then it's decendant, petrichor.

Over the past few years I have been trying to be more respectful of the familiar. To recognize that the glorious unfamiliar that I drank like sweet wine in Colorado was in fact familiar to those who lived there. They passed by every day without seeing it, and what a waste! My dh doesn't understand how I love Oklahoma with the flatness, the heat, the small trees that bend northward under the relentlessness of the south spring winds. I think it's because I can see it with eyes that forget it's familiar. I can find such glory in simply watching the clouds billow and build and disperse and move across the sky that reaches like a bowl above me, with it's rim settled on the horizon all around. You can't see that kind of sky just everywhere. People ooh and aww over it when they come to visit. So why shouldn't I appreciate it every day?