Outside at dusk just after the rain, everything smells vegetative and exactly like earthworms. I walk under a tree with Murphy where the wind blows the leaves and I enjoy a faux rain.

I love also the smell of rain on hot concrete. It’s a beautiful ripe summer smell.

The love and the delight of the smell of rain on hot concrete and with it the smell of worms must predate the time when, as a lad, my dad used to make me sell earthworms by the roadside. We used to keep them, the worms, with the milk and the eggs in the fridge in Styrofoam. Whilst I sat behind a big hand-painted sign — “Earthworms. Caught Fresh. $2” —, whilst I, grubby-handed, made change in the summer sun, schoolmates with better dressed dads and swankier cars would stop by and smile at me grotesquely from the backseat as their fathers bought them worms with which to go fishing.

I can barely blame my father for not taking me fishing. When I was younger, younger than my earthworm days, I did go fishing with my dad once or twice; well, insomuch as he would fish and I would crawl up to the inside of the front of the borrowed boat and read Richie Rich comics amidst the smell of heated fiberglass and wet lifejackets. But it was lovely to be on the lake, to be young, and to live in a time when comics were a quarter.

It occurs to me now that I don’t know how else you would catch a worm but freshly.

SS