Changes in the weather

When I stepped outside just before heading up to bed last night, I noticed a smell I hadn’t smelled in a long time. It wasn’t completely foreign to me, but it wasn’t anything that had been in the air recently, and I can’t exactly describe it, except that it comes sometimes with rain: sort of a metallic scent that reminds me a little bit of dirty hair. We’d had light rain on and off all day, but this isn’t the way rain always smells, or even often. Just occasionally. Like last night.

I don’t know where the smell came from – some particular combination of the air and the groundsoil and the precipitation, or maybe even something as specific as a mushroom that was blooming due to the moisture – but what struck me was how the environment immediately around us has changed so often in the past few weeks. Every day feels like a different biosystem, or micro-biosystem anyway. One day last week the air was as humid as it normally is during a tropical storm. Another day was one of the windiest I’ve known; my mother and I went for a walk in the afternoon and picked up debris from falling branches on the driveway the whole way out to the road and then picked up more debris on the way back that had fallen since we’d last passed by. Other nights in the past few weeks have smelled like quintessential New England fall, the air crisp and dry, with a scent of pine and maple.

Smelling the unusual metallic/dirty hair/rain smell last night reminded me of how many changes we witness outdoors at this time of year. In the winter, when the ground is frozen, changes in the atmosphere are almost imperceptible: one frozen night and day seem indistinguishable from the next. And in the summer, when the heat and humidity hover, the weather can seem to change very little for days on end as well. But this fall has been like a kaleidoscope of climate: the temperature, humidity, ground cover -- from dry leaves to wet leaves to acorns -- and yes, even the smell of the air, have changed daily.

I’m grateful I can be outside experiencing it for so much of the day. Yesterday I walked to school with Holly in the morning, then set off from there on a two-mile run; later in the day I walked next door to my parents’ house, and earlier in the day I had been out to the barnyard to let the sheep out to graze. When I was working in a corporate environment full-time, one of the hardest parts of it for me was how often I would be indoors from 8:30 a.m. until 5 p.m. or later. It just seemed like such a waste of the world not to get out into it at all. Sometimes during lunch I’d walk around a residential neighborhood near my office, an uninspiring neighborhood with busy streets and a jumble of houses that had little character but at least gave me a chance to be outside.

This is a time of year when our surroundings change fast: the grass begins to die off, the leaves change colors and fall from the trees, acorns encrust the ground, pine needles turn to mulch. There’s a lot to see, and I try to spend a lot of time outdoors witnessing it. It’s autumn in New England, and I don’t want to miss a thing.