It is raining and there is that smell on the air. It is the smell of wet earth. That smell that spells, “it’s really here now.” Since 1964 it has a name, petrichor, which means so much as “blood of the gods running on stone.” Whereby the blood of the gods you smell is really a mixture of rain and soil bacteria and something plants produce to stop the seed of other plants from germinating. Since that latter generous activity is likely only needed in moments of extraordinary fecundity, you might say your nose is right: it is the smell of spring, even if you smell it in mid summer. If you sniff deeply and roll it in your mouth like a fine wine or morning coffee or the first cigarette after a difficult exam, you can even taste the stone in the smell of dust wetted after a long interval of dry.

All winter, scenting “water is here” was the woods in snow when the temperature peeps above freezing, redolent of that greenhouse in Holland at Christmastime that pulls my heart. That was petrichor minus the stone. Just water if you please, no earth. If that brings me deeply personal happiness coming from the belly, then petrichor is happiness of a more species-memory intensity: rain after a long dry spell. Relief of the soul, relief of thirst, relief from hunger.

The slow, slow melt was so imperceptible that you could only tell it in the tinkling of a little bit of water running away under the snow, in the ever-widening area of water among the ice in the bog where the beaver slaps his tail at all the geese that would settle at his end. But it was moving along, and I was getting afraid we’d miss out on the rushing, mad melt that comes and comes and comes until there is no more, leaving behind a spent dust waiting for some more rain.

But still the water was rising in the bog and our own being in the bog was rising and we ventured time and again on snowshoes still across pieces of ice and hummocks of as-yet-frozen reeds and grass to where the beaver had done his work. And there was Buddy so intently and intensely turned on by the smell and promise of the beaver – a playmate?—that he didn’t know what to do do with himself on the way home, trying to drag along every stick he could find, looking taut and every inch the hunting dog he was supposed to be at one point in time.

And the beaver herself patrolling the pond and chasing away each and every intruder, too busy to keep up with the water – at this time likely overwhelmed by the sound of water rushing her dams, the sound of water that holds her prisoner to her need to build them.

And me, listening to the little tinkles under the snow and the slightly larger rushes of the water over the dam, hoping for ever more melting ice to start flowing on its way to the Atlantic and take my spirit with it all the while as it stays here noting the goose acting truly weird across the bog, making as if her wing is broken and I’d better chase her and – could it be already? – not go after the tiny head of the other goose sitting on the nest some 20 feet away.

And now it is raining. Water is here. Blood of the earth. And with the water, everything changes.