Petrichor

Later, when the dust has settled, we can determine what has happened. Footprints, tracks in the sand, bones scat, there are countless indicators. On the way from where I park to the house, the frog puddles have just about dried up, and they're like a codex of tracks. I went back out with my animal track and scat book. There were the tracks of deer, coon, possum, fox, various moles and shrews, chipmunks, and a great many birds. It's a lovely imprinted sheet of mud and clay. An interesting word problem this weekend, can't remember if I mentioned it. I had read the word petrichor in a Luca Turin description of a particular perfume, and I could tell from the context what the word probably meant, but I'd never actually seen the word before, so I started hauling out dictionaries, ending with the OED, and, alas, no luck. I can't search the internet at home, with the combination of a dying Black Dell and a dial-up connection. First thing this morning, after the staff meeting, I had a chance to track it down. The reason I couldn't find it was that it wasn't coined until 1964. I have unabridged dictionaries from after that date, but it's a fairly esoteric word and not in any of them; and I don't have any supplements for the OED (completed in 1928), therefore no record of the word. Two Australian researchers published an article in Nature magazine in 1964, the subject of which was the smell after a rain. Seems there are several oils that protect plants in arid places, that prevent them from germinating if the moisture available is just dew. But they are water soluble, rain is enough to release them, and they smell nice. Often intensified by ozone, if there had been lightning. So it means, more or less, the smell of rain on dry earth. Because I've never heard anyone actually use the word, I'm still a little uncertain about how it's pronounced, but what a great word. It comes from the Latin, and if I had known that, I could have found it at home, but it didn't scan as a Latin word to me, and I hadn't bothered to check those dictionaries. In fact I called Glenn, because I thought it might be French. I'll be using this word in the future, because it is so wonderfully specific. I've noticed the phenomena a thousand times, we all have, I just didn't know it had a name; not unlike napp, which I never knew was a word, and now use all the time, since I drive by a spillway every day I work, going and coming. I love words, and jargons, and patois. In the building trades language is rife with phrases that don't make sense in any other context. It's like that in any discipline, you need words to describe things: there usually is one, but if not, you make one up, a dance step or a new way of doing the high-jump, we just need a referent. Add an adjective and object out the remainder. Multiply by the local tax base. It's all corrupt, of course, the contracts and the jobs awarded; but it's good to feel, once in a while, that you advance the token. What the Lord giveth. There were seven stacks of about ten books each on the footlocker I use as a coffee table and I got up in the middle of the night (3:30), could tell I wasn't going back to sleep, so I decided to finish this paragraph. Which meant rolling a smoke and getting a wee dram. Came downstairs in the dark, no problem, and headed over toward my desk, to get my whiskey glass and turn on my writing lamp. Caught the edge of an art book that was protruding into the passage space (Modigliani) with my left thigh, and three of the piles of books fanned out on the floor. There is some organization involved, even in simple piles, but I can't bother with it at 3:30 in the morning, so I turn on a light and crude-stack them back where they were, some of them inside out (so that you couldn't see the titles), and some of them upside down. Clearly I'll need to spend a few hours shelving books next weekend. But I do get my wee dram, roll a smoke; and spend several hours deleting words, changing out commas. Reading back over, fully engaged by text, I amaze myself by the attention to detail. I think about how I might explain that to a writing workshop: how slowly I work, how precise I try to be, how difficult it is to write a speaking voice. I talk out loud, incessantly, when I'm writing, trying out different words, changing the emphasis, considering punctuation. I'm after a seamless sophisticated bar-talk, that conversation we might have with our feet up, swirling an odd single-malt to catch the last rays of sun.