The best part about a rainy morning is the smell of worms in the air. There's something way too fresh about it. I don't even know if it's the worms I'm smelling, but I definitely associate the smell with the worms crawling out onto the sidewalks and streets. It's not the worms I like. The smell takes me back to a simpler time. It's a "cottage smell," and every time it rains I think of rainy cottage days, being cooped inside a small house, looking out onto the lake as the droplets drop, drop, drop. When the temperature's right, the doors stay open, and the scent of wet foliage floods the house, and there's nowhere at that moment that anybody needs to be, nothing that needs to be done. When we were children, it was the scent of an afternoon Monopoly marathon, an indoor pool-noodle fight (to my parents chagrin), a chess tournament or a galoshes-and-raincoat-clad trip to the art gallery or the Native Reserve, or Peterborough.
The only real thing that's changed over the years is that all the kids have now grown up. We don't each have our own raincoat and rubber boots anymore and we've lost the patience for Monopoly, but we've developed a taste tolerance for liquor. And so a new family bonding tradition was born. And as I sit in my office in Streetsville looking out at the rain and a full tree of dripping leaves, my heart is in another place, watching droplets drop, drop, drop into a lake, and breathing in the smell of worms.