The Smell ovf Rain

Write about a character who smells something familiar and is instantly taken back to the first moment they smelled it.

The Scent of Rain

-       Gloria Sendelbaugh

I am an older woman who has reconciled that as I age my universe becomes smaller.  That I can get in and out of a grocery store quickly remains one of my expectations. But today I am slowed down sitting behind the steering wheel of my car in a food market parking lot waiting for a spring rainstorm to move on and aggravate someone else. The storm assails the roof of my car and my windows steam up. No one would have guessed I was in the car were it not for rhythmic sway of my wipers.  As I wait for the rain to stop, I find that I can recognize the familiar soothing fragrances of the rain now filtering into my car and I begin to relax.

My mind wanders back to the smell of another rainstorm at Easter when I was eleven years old. I was watching the rain sitting cross-legged under the eaves of the field house across the street from my childhood home. I had quickly left the Easter holiday festivities at my home which was filled to the rafters with people, most of whom I would rather not know. At eleven it was easy to react this way.

Sitting there in my Easter finery watching the rain under the eaves, I saw two very tall thin nuns from my Catholic grade school, sans umbrellas, running down the walkway across from the field house where I was sitting.  Dressed in their black habits, rosaries jingling from their waists, they ran towards their convent at the end of the street to escape the rain. The nuns were disheveled, and their sopping wet religious begun to resemble clothing at the beginning of the rinse cycle of a load of black laundry. I was disenchanted by my observation as I had come to prefer my nuns to be dressed in well preserved and pressed habits with humongous rosaries hanging at their waist. But I had also been disappointed the previous year once I discovered out that nuns had breasts. In my young mind, nuns had an image to uphold.

Following the towering nuns, a third shorter and chubbier nun with wire framed glasses was ambling some twenty feet behind them. She was one of the older nuns at the convent. She was also my sixth-grade teacher. She suddenly stopped and threw her arms upward and tilted her face towards the sky. At first, I thought she was praising Jesus, as the nuns of my childhood tended to do. I wanted to run up to this bespectacled nun to have a closer look, but I had earlier learned that you do not get in the way of a nun and her Jesus. So, I did what any normal Catholic kid would do after finding a nun doing something unusual, I stared.

The nun, sensing my staring at her, used her pointer finger to beckon me to cross the street to her. My earlier disciplinary encounter with this nun had involved my sharing spitballs with some boys across my sixth-grade classroom the previous winter.  Upon discovery, it did not go well for my disobedient tribe. We had to stay after school and to write something like “young Jesus did not throw spitballs” one-hundred times leaving to me to ponder if an older Jesus ever did. Did it stop my fascination with illicit classroom activities? Not really. My compadres and I just chose a more discreet activity, making armpit noises.

So, based on my prior corrective experience with this nun, I went to her hoping that I could avoid having to write “thou shall not stare” one-hundred times as it was a holiday.

As I walked across the street in the rain, my Easter dress began dripping through to my skin.  I started to take slippery slides inside my coveted pair of white patent leather shoes as they filled with rain. As much as I liked errant classmates of the boy persuasion, I loved my dresses and shoes. The embroidered violets on the collar my dress began to merge with the yellow nylon bodice of the dress. I no longer was the model ripped from the very pages of the 1963 spring/summer Montgomery Ward catalog (page 13). I had become a traumatized piece of nylon with flopping patent leather shoes.  I was grief-stricken as I begun to ruminate that I was the only one who ever had experienced this ordeal in my eleven-year-old universe. I would be an outcast for the rest of my life!

As I reached the other side of the street, the short round nun took hold of my hand and asked if I felt the rain upon me. I hesitantly said yes hoping that this encounter would go better than the spitball incident. 

It almost did.

She then asked if I could smell the rain, that it was a gift from God. Breathing in, my eyes suddenly sprung wide and I nodded that I could. I felt like I was witnessing a classroom science experiment in which I was interested and not bored napping with my eyes open. The smells of freshness, grass, and coolness fed my young soul. I inhaled these scents a thousand times before but this time I felt I had finally met my own Jesus, as my awareness was at its peak.

What I thought was my newfound nun friend and I stood together arms out and faces upward. We began to spin like two visiting swirling dervishes from Turkey. The slow drizzle of rain continued as we enjoyed the scent of the and spun what seemed an exceptionally long time. My arms grew tired and I became dizzy.  I stopped to wobbly investigate the nun’s wet and opulent face hoping to find some alliance there. However, she stopped and took the moment to advise me that throwing spitballs was not a godly gift and that Jesus never would throw a spitball at others. Alas, the disobedience of my friends and I would never be forgotten.

The once forgotten memory passed and I return to the current situation inside of my car. The rain has stopped, and my car windows began to defog. As I open the windows of my car, smelling the scents of the rain, I smile remembering that the scent of rain is truly a gift as taught to me at the hands of my sixth-grade nun.

And while I no longer throw spitballs, I still must let go of armpit noises.