Petrichor

The first drops darken the flagstones like a language returning to the mouth after years of silence, and the earth exhales its held secret— that mineral prayer, older than green. Somewhere a child tilts her face to the low sky, tasting iron and the ghost of last summer's dust. The gutters begin their stammered hymn. Underground, the mycelia quicken, threading messages through root and stone, syllables of moisture parsing the dark. Every buried thing leans toward the surface the way a sleeper turns toward morning. It is not the rain we love but the waking it performs— how the dry field, given nothing but the weight of falling water, remembers how to smell like itself.