Fair Weather

There is a maternal quality in the smell of rain on soil.

In Alabama the soil's deep red clay leaks sweet odor into the scraggy pines, pushing the steam from the hollow places up the faces of the hills, breaking across the long twitchy green (high with bugs, and clotted with weeds). Grass is cut, dies, and rots in place blending in calm putrescence like a broth to attract flies.

Florida the rain is violent, sucking life into your lungs, punching tracheal parts with its choking force.  The sand breathes it in, and the chitinous shelled things shrug it off; mysterious reptiles soaking it in, radiating it out from themselves.

Tennessee is mute, old and tepid.  Lovely and closed in, boxed into the hills.  I can smell it across the room.  They are asleep.  The storm has passed.