smells like rain

The rain today has been nice. Not the cold and miserable kind of rain. A relatively nice sprinkling that doesn't permeate your raincoat and gives everything a nice new smell. Since we are next to the cornfields in Berkeley, you notice all the strong smells of vegetation, particularly in the rain. Things always smell different in the rain. Some smells seem to carry farther. The evaporation from the object carrying with it a bit of scent.

My mother had the nose of a bloodhound and I wonder if my sense of smell will ever kick in. As of late it seems to be. I've been smelling things I didn't notice before. The sense of smell worsens as you get older, thus the old women who wear lethal doses of really strong perfume. Or does the sense of smell diminish with the ability to delineate the subtle differences in smell so that everything is just sniffed at once.

My hormones certainly affect how well my sense of smell is working as one thing that I might love to eat one day seems really repulsive the next.

Chatting with some cousins, they talked about the "smell of America" that came from the balikbayan boxes and that they realized when they got here, the "smell of America" was actually Downey fabric softener.

At the dentist, in the nice relatively sterile environment, I thought I smelled someone. Not someone in the office who smelled. But I thought I caught the scent of someone I knew. Strange. I had never "smelled" a memory before. I've often been able to feel people, maybe even have a vision of someone's presence, but the first time to smell someone.

Looks like the weather for London will clear up by the time we get there, pushing into the upper to mid-50s while we're there. Then again, maybe it'll be the finicky London weather that will fill with rainclouds in an instant. Either way, it'll be interesting to discover the smells of Europe.