It rained last night. It didn’t begin as that gentle, soft, easy rain that lulled me to sleep with my window open. The storm began to the northeast, how odd that seemed, with dark clouds gathering in an inverted bowl shape and bolt lightening hitting just beyond the field of students practicing soccer. I waited impatiently for the kids to run for cover, waited for the teacher to send them in, but they continued the practice. The scene was oddly surreal, as if two photographs had been edited together, each part having no business being attached to the other. The storm, as if minding the teacher, kept its distance from the field until the practice was completed and the students safely inside. Unleashed, the clouds and lightening and thunder and rain all rushed over the field toward the house and we watched in fascinated wonder at Nature’s excited dance of freedom. The air cooled and the breeze filled with a hundred scents, only a few we could identify. By bedtime, the frenzied boogie had calmed to a lovely waltz of soft rain and gentle breezes so that the windows could be opened when the lights were out.
Suddenly I wasn’t in Virginia anymore, I am at home in Glendale the first summer the Dodgers played in L.A.; my window open and the clock radio crackling with the voice of Vin Scully, hearing for the first time the names of Pee Wee Reese, Gil Hodges, Duke Snider, Jim Gilliam, Don Drysdale, and Sandy Koufax. Zap! I am the only one awake at my grandmother's house in La Crescenta, reading Photoplay while I listen to the pine trees whipping about outside, the smell of dusty rain in the air. Zing! I am sitting on a screened porch at a Maine cabin near Camden, watching a late summer squall flash across Penobscot Bay.
Time travel by smell, what a glorious trip.
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