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Amy Bennett Williams Essays

Petrichor

Amy Bennett Williams

In consideration of the factors that create one’s sense of place, it can be easy to overlook one powerful characteristic: the smells. In this week’s essay, News-Press story teller Amy Bennett Williams takes us on an olfactory journey through some of the common and not-so-common scents associated with the Southwest Florida experience including her favorite; a smell named by geologists in the 1960s.

Even before Florida was my home, it smelled that way to me.

Although I later came to adore the frenetic, filthy fizz of life in Mexico City, the first few days of my study-abroad year there were breathtakingly lonely.

I remember groping my way along a petroleum-scented downtown street, dodging the sharp-elbowed crowd, random trash heaps, shrill lottery hawkers and scabby strays until a pair of tall glass doors appeared in front of me. I pushed through and found myself standing in front of a department store cosmetics counter. I uncapped the nearest cologne bottle, hoping to drown out the dog/exhaust/ripe garbage haze and breathed.

I almost wept with gratitude. Suddenly adrift on a cloud of orange blossoms, I was once again in Florida, holding my grandpa's hand as he picked me a tangelo from Uncle Frank's tree. Citrus trees bloom and fruit at the same time, Grandpa explained, snapping off a nosegay of starry white flowers for me to smell.

So all these years later, I still have an almost unreasoning love for their perfume (and still occasionally hunt down the odd imported Flor de Naranja cologne from Sanborn's, the store into which I'd stumbled).

But even given our history, I must confess that citrus blossoms are not my favorite Southwest Florida scent.

No, olfactory contrarian that I am, the fragrances that make me weakest in the knees are the ones that make some people turn up their noses: the rougher, rawer part of our scent spectrum.

I'm not talking about truck stop rest rooms or fast food grease traps; more along the lines of low-tide mud, distant skunk and outboard exhaust.

I'm sure association has something to do with it. As a new Floridian, the places I first explored were the wet ones. I scrambled and plunged through the mangroves, up to my elbows in muck, latticed with barnacle scratches and happier than I'd ever been.

I imagine the air I breathed didn't smell much different to the Calusa: fish, salt, leaf rot, sun-warmed mud - the simmer and seethe of life, rocked by tides in this sea-scented cradle.

It was a perfume I'd never smelled before, yet it was somehow as familiar as my mother's.

One of my favorite passages from Diane Ackerman's "A Natural History of the Senses" is this: "Smell is the most direct of our senses... (Smell) needs no interpreter. The effect is immediate and undiluted by language, thought or translation. ... Stumbling on new smells is one of the delights of travel" - or of finding a new home, in my case.

Ackerman also writes that our sense of smell is "a throwback to that time, early in evolution, when we thrived in the oceans. An odor must first dissolve into a watery solution ... before we can smell it" which explains my favorite favorite smell: petrichor - that ferny, limey, leaf-drip scent that rises from dried-out earth that's just been soaked with rain.

Petrichor's an ungainly word for so ethereal a scent, but give it a break - it was coined by geologists who created it by tacking together two Greek words: petros (stone) and ichor (the blood of the gods). Their word first appeared nearly 50 years ago in their article, "Nature of Agrillaceous Odour," published in the scientific journal Nature.

The Australian authors, I.J. Bear and R.G. Thomas, wrote: "Petrichor, well known to mineralogists as argillaceous odour, is commonly observed as the pleasant and refreshing odour which frequently accompanies the first rains after a warm dry period. Several possible mechanisms have been considered in connection with the origin of this odour. ... Oxidation and transformation of sorbates take place on the rock surface and are accelerated by warm to hot climatic conditions. The odorous and volatile products of these processes are subsequently displaced from the pores of the rock by moisture when the relative humidity of the atmosphere approaches saturation."

All of which is to say that when it's been dry for a while and then it rains, it's as if nature stirs, shakes herself, tosses a shimmery shawl over her shoulders, then sashays forth, trailing a silvery mist of perfume with the power to make grown and sober people dance, cry, sing or shout - before it hushes them with its holiness.

Amy Bennett Williams Essays