On an afternoon just like this, when the sky goes dark, I stand and flip the lock and raise the window, and when the raindrops hit the leaves and the deck and the driveway I get just a hint of what I’m looking for, a tang high up in the palate. It’s called petrichor. I finally looked it up. I didn’t know it had a name.
I can’t decide if I feel better or worse. The word sounds clinical and abstract, something created in a lab. My research goes on to tell me that it was coined by a pair of minerologists. Australian mineralogists – a man and a woman. I find myself suddenly anxious to know the details of their working relationship. In fact the further I dig, the more words I unearth for this curious taste or scent. Geomesin. Ozone. Damp earth. That last one suffers from a lack of imagination. Surely the mineralogists could abstract it into something conceptual, something more Latinate and obscure.
What I’d have them do if I had them here with me – these sensuous rock scientists – is I’d send them out to dig their fingers into the herb garden out back after a shower. Or let them rub their cheeks against the sides of a goatskin canteen. Let them watch the water bead on the bottom of a steel dipper as it’s raised from a wooden bucket and see what declensions they might employ to elide or twist or limn. Let them take a deep breath of the air of my street on the afternoon my friend stepped out into the downpour so intense that the air was white. Barefoot like an idiot onto the road with her hair down over her face and laughing, shoulders up against her ears, Ozzy Osbourne t-shirt stuck flat against her back and her hands out and open to me, her teeth as white as the rain, hopping on one foot, and then the next.