7 Comments
User's avatar
Katie Steele's avatar

Lovely. We had lovely family members visit us this week, for the first time. We had planned to go to the local art museum on Tuesday, but when we found it closed for the day, we spent about 3 hours weeding one of the garden beds with me (I am far behind, due to a shoulder injury). Petrichor was a word of the day.

Expand full comment
Stephanie C. Bell's avatar

Dogs do this so well, don't they? This was beautiful Patti. <3

Expand full comment
Jean's avatar

This hits me where I live. Noticing scents and everyday ordinary beauty feeds my soul. It's funny but some 60+ years later I can still smell that plastic Halloween mask I wore as a child. Pretty strong scent memory! Recently people lined up to see and smell a corpse flower that had bloomed in the Conservatory here. Lining up to experience the smell of rotting flesh (so I've been told). It only blooms once every 3 yrs! Our sense of smell, I've learned, is our strongest sense and the last one we lose. I love breathing in petrichor! And so much more. Thanks for this lovely piece of writing.

Expand full comment
Janie Starr's avatar

makes me think of Joanna Macy's final book, ""A Wild Love for the World" which a friend told me about recently. Thank you so much, Patti, for this post and for introducing me to the word "Petrichor"... Beautiful!

Expand full comment
Margot Wagner's avatar

Petrichor, Sounder- liking the vocab freshening. Thank you for another good piece of writing.

Expand full comment
Heloise Jones's avatar

Simply Beautiful. Peace within each sentence.

Expand full comment
Terri Grayum's avatar

This is so beautiful, Patti. The art of paying attention is becoming a lost one, I fear.

I have a self-imposed rule that I may NOT listen to podcasts when I'm out in the garden. For one thing, it interrupts the sound of birds and wind and leaves fluttering. For another, I don't want the plants exposed to some of the news items I listen to!

I love this: "Scents... demand your nose, your body, your nearness. A world of scents is a world that asks you to slow down." Yes please!!

Expand full comment