Smells of Rain

Do you have smells that immediately take you to some other place far into your past? I do . . . all the time.

Today is a rainy day. It's been rainy all week. And when I leave my car in the morning to walk across a still-wet parking lot I am assaulted with a smell that takes me back to my school days. The smell of earth worms.

My sisters and I had to walk to the bus stop. And on the morning after a rain, all over the blacktop we found thousands of wriggling little worms that had crawled topside to escape their waterlogged underground homes. The smell was good, in a way, because it reminded us to keep alert and tiptoe through the minefield of little pink bodies. Accidently stepping on one would bring about a loud "eeewwwwwww", a few giggles, a "sisterly" remark about the now-stinky shoe, and the scraping of shoes across a bare patch of blacktop in an attempt to remove every stinky remnant.

Now there are other smells that take me back also, but invariably they are not pleasant smells. I don't smell bread baking and think of home. I don't smell strong perfume and think of an older relative. It's the bad smells that imprint on the olfactory memory part of the brain. Wet tube socks still take me back to the high school locker room, duck droppings remind me of the walkway to the back porch, and the mixture of Lysol and cigarette smoke . . . well, we won't even go there.