I smell rain

They've been promising us rain today - 80% chance of it, which would be great for a bit of drought relief. There are a few misty clouds hanging around, but nothing definite.

Yet I've just had a whiff of rain drift in through the window. It's coming, maybe not immediately, but very soon.

There are few smells that I love as much as the scent of rain - showers on hot dry ground, grass growing almost immediately after a good downpour. Sometimes all I want to do in a storm is stand outside and breathe deeply. Sometimes that's exactly what I do.

Growing up in Zimbabwe, we were in a summer rainfall area. It would be hot and raining all at once, and we'd go swimming in the roadside ditches as they filled up. We'd ride our bikes in the warm wet weather and come home happily drenched. Storms with a good deal of loud thunder and bright lightning were the ideal.

Here in the Cape the rain is usually cold and misty-damp. Years ago the winter storms would start on Easter weekend (when the local church all gathered for a big camp in tents up the coast, and generally got mud-soaked and frozen) and wouldn't let up until Spring. It would drift down gently on strong north-westerly winds while the trees bowed and swayed under low grey skies. It's cuddle up weather, hot drink weather, long afternoon nap under piles of duvets with a few dogwarmers weather. It's not the hot and skin-tickling rain of my youth. But it leaves everything green and dripping and new.

There are few sounds I like more than rain on a tin roof. Or rain on huge arum lily leaves outside my bedroom window. Rain pounding on glass windows or dripping down eaves. Making zig-zags on the chainlink fence.

Maybe it harks back to my pre-birth state, surrounded by water and warmth. Enveloped like a fish in a fishbowl in the dark, perfectly in my element. This love of the wet, its sounds and smells, goes back to when I was a simple cell or two.

Right now I smell rain. I'm watching for the gathering clouds, the first drops, the gurgling streams down gutters and roads. I think I'll walk home barefoot today.