As a kid growing up in Central New Jersey, one of the great hot summer smells was the after-the-rain-stopped-aroma of evaporating rainfall dissipating into steam from the blacktop combined with the scent of the wet grass. That was how I knew it was summer.
Petrichor is the technical term for the smell of rain. I was an adult before I ever learned it and have marveled over how perfectly it describes something I never even knew had a name. What I didn't know until the other day, is what causes petrichor and how it comes to be made.
Science tells me it's geosmin and 2-MIB, and that's well and good I suppose, though I will always think of it as the smell of summer and the promise of wonder that it portends. And when I remember the summers of my boyhood I always hear this.
-bill kenny
