Go to the park. Lie down. Inhale.

Something happens when the rain stops: you can smell the earth. Bellingham has a rich, tangy odor, stronger for being suppressed by near-constant rain for so much of the year. It reminds me of visits to sunny places, Kennewick, Redlands, Arvada. It's astonishing how the senses of a season can change my mood so profoundly.

I read a National Geographic article on smell once. It talked about how smell's power to affect and retrieve memory exceeded that of all other senses. And it seemed a mystery to them, like it has this deep connection to memory that they don't understand.
And they were half right, smell does create powerful memory associations. But I later came to realize that the connection works most strongly because of a scent's ephemerality. It's no mystery, it's just rarity. The other senses are tied to objects that can be kept, consulted, reused, preserved. Scents are momentary, impossible to bottle and difficult to reproduce. Memories buried and disassociated by frequent access on one path (say, an old and oft-seen picture of an event) can often come back, vivid and immediate, when one catches a scent they haven't smelled since (say, the shirt s/he was wearing at the event).

Summer is like that. Smelling it happens only during that season, and it calms me. I have wonderful memories of summer and they are welcomed back every year.

I wanted this to be poetic but it turned out analytical.