The First Rain Smells Like a Date Everyone Remembers

Nobody announces it and everybody knows within the hour. The first rain. Somewhere between the middle of October and the middle of November, the summer, which by then has been in the apartment too long, finally leaves, and the whole region exhales at once. You can be in a meeting, in a bus, in a argument, and someone at the window says the word, and the room reorganizes. The smell arrives before the water. Dust that has been waiting since April, warm stone, the eucalyptus by the parking lot, and underneath it something green that had been standing by all summer, unemployed. Scientists say the smell is plant oils and soil bacteria releasing their chemistry into the wet air. The scientists are right and also missing the point. The smell is the smell of a date. Everyone who grew up here has a first rain memory filed under the same scent, and every first rain uncorks them all simultaneously. Mine is a downpour from when I was nine. School let out early because the roof of the corridor leaked, and I walked home in a rain that had no middle gear, straight from nothing to December. Every gutter in the street became a river with a purpose. The grown-ups ran for doorways and the children did the opposite, obviously, and for one hour the town belonged to us and to the water. I remember a man my grandfather's age standing completely unprotected in it, face up, eyes closed, as if listening to a phone call. I think about that man every year. He was not getting wet. He was receiving it. The streets have their own ceremony. The first rain is the season's auditor. Every clogged drain gets identified. Every roof gets its report. Every balcony plant gets its first drink from above instead of from a hose, and you can read a neighborhood by the speed of its puddles. The road crews work the night after like medics after a match. And the morning after is the famous one, the washed morning, when the air is so clean it feels new and the hills that were all summer a dusty rumor become a line you could draw. There is an etiquette to the day, unwritten like everything here that actually works. Nobody plans anything for the first rainy evening. The plans that exist quietly admit they were soft commitments. The good umbrella comes out of the back of the closet and its failure to open smoothly is a family reunion of grudges. And somewhere in every house, a window is opened briefly, on purpose, to let the smell in. Even the air conditioning generation does this. The body insists. What I have come to understand is that the first rain functions as the region's true new year. The Jewish new year is in the autumn too, and the coincidence is not lost on me. A date for accounting, and then, a few weeks later, a date for renewal that needs no synagogue and no calendar, just water on stone. People resolve things after the first rain. I have watched it. Small things. The neighbor finally fixed the awning. The cafe finally rotated its menu. The city that all summer had been enduring itself became, for an afternoon, a place worth inspecting again. The forecast says Thursday. I have my doubts about Thursday, the forecast here being a genre of fiction, but the window is open either way, and the eucalyptus by the parking lot is standing by, and somewhere a nine year old is about to walk home through a river. The date everyone remembers is coming. The dust has been holding its breath since April.