Tuesday, April 12, 2011

Tremble, ye mortal hearts.


I'm really bad at remembering, or even caring enough, to take my medicine. I'm sure that's not good. Even just now, at 11:31pm, I'm deciding to pop my pill. Oh well, It's done and over with. I don't really have much to say about this post. Pretty self explanatory. I've been trying to work some things on GIMP. Just experimenting, we'll see how it goes.

Many of my local readers would know that Monday night we had a damn near cataclysmic storm pass over us. I spent the evening with my good friend Bill and his lady-friend. Watching the news, keeping an eye out of the window. It was raining sideways. Excellent.

I was really reminded of living in Arizona. Since I moved here to Wisconsin, I've heard people say that they can smell rain before it even appears. Living here for a while now, I've started to be able to smell the weather. It's kind of a funny thing. It's kind of a musty aroma. I can't exactly explain it, but I know what it means.

One thing that can bring me back into my memories more than anything else are smells. I don't exactly remember the smells, but I'll know them when I smell them. Like the smell of the carpet in my 2nd grade class when I was still living in California. The smell of wet pavement brings me back to rainy days in Arizona. Yes, oh nonbeliever, it rains in Arizona. It's a different kind of rain, though. Where here, in Wisconsin, it may sprinkle briefly on and off. In Arizona, it built up. Dark clouds would linger all day long, accumulating and building until eventually it would pop. When the rainclouds finally built to their climax, the outcome was total phenomenal. Just torrential downpours for hours and hours.

You see, where I used to live, the dirt was so dry it couldn't absorb the water quickly enough. When these horrible rainy days would come, they would cause flash floods. But nothing was really ever quite as exciting as  staying in my home, playing Pokemon Gold version on gameboy and listening to the thick drops pitter-patter against my bedroom window.

Amazing how a storm can bring back memories so vividly. Last night, I decided to start up another game of Pokemon Gold. Grown up now, listening to the rain ping against my window air conditioner. Totodile and I are in this for the long run.

2 comments:

  1. How true about the sense of smell taking us back in time to distant memories. The smell of rain is one of my favorite, especially the fast torrential wash of the desert floor. Wet dirt, I love that. My grandmother's house always smelled like eucalyptus. When I smell the ocean I remember my childhood at the beach. I love honeysuckle in the moonlight, and I the smell of the night on an autumn's eve. Great post. Thanks for evoking my own memories in thinking of the smells I love.

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  2. The sense of smell for us is the most acute. I can be immediately transported in time by smells. You mention the carpet in school. I remember the smell of the dusty wooden floors in the entrance hall of my elementary school. The smell of autumn leaves is a huge thing, as is the smell of certain flowers. And then there is the smell of my father's aftershave, left on his robe that I was packing after he died. I felt his presence in the room: Overwhelming feeling of love.

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