“A heavy rain drowns each raindrop; a light rain, like the kind I saw in the woods out behind my house when I was a child, a light rain striking the leaves and branches of trees, further slowing their impact, that rain produces the strongest petrichor of all, the one that renders me into an seven-year-old noticing the world for the first time.
 
“The lightest of rain after the driest of spells leads to the most argillaceous petrichor, which is the kind that humans smell as relief, the thought that things will start growing again.” — “Petrichor,” Jan. 26, 2015

We called it “The Woods.” Well, I did. Sometimes, I referred to it as a “forest,” which it most certainly was not. Our backyard ended at a line of trees and the dross beneath them; our lightly manicured, suburban lawn did not grow beyond that line, despite my teen-aged lawn mowing efforts to expand it by clearing the dead leaves and branches away. That tight boundary made The Woods appear all the more elemental and foreign.
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