Petrichor
Smells we wish we could bottle
Dear Bolu,
Two days ago, the sound of rain battering my roof jolted me out of bed. I dashed out of the room to shut the windows around the house. As I hurried to the kitchen, I was caught by the sweet petrichor that filled the air. I slowed down. Leaning against the kitchen counter, I inhaled as much of it as my lungs allowed.
“It will be gone soon,” I thought.
As the rain fell, I wondered about a different life. One where I travelled the world in pursuit of different flavours of petrichor. One where I became a connoisseur of the subject.
“Professor Petrichor,” I imagine they would call me, like something out of the wizarding world.
I imagined myself in a raincoat somewhere in the Philippines, staring down the lens of a waterproof camera and remarking, with satisfaction, that the ground was giving off an incense of gratitude for the showers of blessing it had received.
“This full, earthy smell will be gone soon,” I thought to myself in the kitchen. “I wish I could bottle it.”
I can’t, of course. Still, I wonder if there is some bottled version of petrichor out there. And if not petrichor exactly, then perhaps something close enough to remind me of it. It makes me think of John Green’s observation in The Anthropocene Reviewed, that scratch-and-sniff stickers aren’t meant to mimic the natural world exactly. Instead, they create combinations of smells that simply make us remember bananas, ocean mist, freshly grown grass. Or, in this case, petrichor.
I think now of all the smells I’d love to bottle. Some familiar ones I stumble upon but cannot place before they vanish. Some are lost forever: home, Grandma’s stew, home again. Some fill me with dreams: petrichor. And the one that I hallucinate, dear friend.
Fin.
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- Wolemercy