a freshly struck match

The rain started late Sunday night and on Monday morning I awoke early to a pearly grey dawn. Three hours later, it looked just the same, as if time had stopped. All cloudy grey fog and opalescent light. It seemed to me, as I walked to work that morning (and every wet morning since), that people must have been hiding in their homes; the sidewalks were silent, and I only wished that I, too, could crawl back into my rumpled bed. Tea, books, sleep—anything but slacks wet past my ankles and hours in an office still riding high on a love of air conditioning. 

I'm an autumn girl, but I like dry autumns best. When the leaves, yellowed and browned, crunch, scatter and blow across streets and through alleys, instead of forming masses of pure wet and sinking to clog gutters and puddles.

Despite the rain. Despite the plugged gutters and effervescent puddles, the smells of the outdoors are shifting to autumn and, as a fellow blogger wrote, “mixed in with the clean chill of the air and the musty fallen leaves, overpowering the parade of pumpkin-spiced this and pumpkin-spiced that, and in concert with geese flying south: sulfur and phosphorus, a freshly struck match.”

Be it a dry autumn or wet, that smell is enough to soothe my soul.

It seeps through the rain with the fog.