Damp

Over a year ago, I started a blog post (that I never finished) with the following:

"When I stepped outside after class tonight into the rainy night air, it felt so familiar that I was surprised by it. I recognized that smell, that damp, musty smell of rain on the Chatham campus in Pittsburgh. It's been months since it was warm enough to just rain, and I welcomed the familiarity and surprising comfort that it brought me."

That's as far as I got, but I had a similar experience the other night when my husband and I got home fairly late at the end of a rainy day. The moment I stepped out of the car and walked into the weak light of the garage, I inhaled a downpour of memories. "It smells like Pittsburgh," I said happily, breathing deeply. I had to explain (or rather, I wanted to explain) that it rained so often in Pittsburgh that it's a smell I automatically associate with that city: damp, wet, almost musty. The smell of earth that never completely dries.

Immediately, I was back in Pittsburgh, walking home after class. The night was heavy with water, mist clinging to my hair and skin. I walked across the mostly-empty campus and stepped down the cement stairs that cut through the side campus lawn. There was a lamp post halfway down the stairs, and it shone with a halo of moisture around it. The rain wasn't falling anymore, but water was tangibly still in the air. I walked downhill toward the second lamp post which illuminated Woodland Road, my shoes slapping the wet cement caked with leaves and debris from the overhanging bushes and trees. I hurried down Woodland Road to College Avenue, reassured by the orange glow of streetlights with their similar halos. I had spent the first month of my stay in Pittsburgh hating the humidity with every pore in my skin, but now, as Spring was returning and the frigid winter had melted, I greeted the water-air as a...well, not quite friend. Companion. Compatriot. A piece of my experience that was unique to my Pittsburgh life, and I was delighted that I recognized is as something familiar.

Spring in Utah was wet enough this year that I got to breathe in the rain-soaked air more than once and breathe deeply and remember. I wouldn't have ever thought that "damp" would be a favorite smell, but now it is something that connects me to my Pittsburgh home and I welcome it. Even if it means having to wait until May for Spring to actually arrive.