when I was a little girl in Houston I read somewhere in August you could smell the very beginning of fall and so I went outside and smelled and smelled all August and was extremely confused!
I was just living in the wrong state, because here you can smell it: soft, a relief, unmistakable
Grew up in Beaumont. The only thing you could smell in August was petrochemical plants, wood pulp if the wind blew right, and body odor.
When I was in the UK this summer, the light changed so fast! One morning sunrise was at 4am and then after a blink it was 5:30am
It made me think about how many different cycles there are in the world and how we feel every one of them so differently, depending on where we’re from
I never experienced Autumn until I moved from Texas to the DMV
And I still get excited by the explosions of color the trees take on every year
My FIL used to say, “it smells like football” as the weather started to get cooler and less muggy in mid August.
Is it a hint of Petrichor with the first rains ?
Here we have the smell of Autumn, the crispness,the deer with their racks, bears with cubs, turkeys massing together and stalking the woods, foxes barking on the cooler nights, and the softening of sunlight. And yet there are those who see the sale of pumpkin spice latte as the harbinger of autumn.
Houston always has that lovely chemical smell in the air.
I miss that scent in my soul. Sometimes you get it in South Texas, but usually in January. We back in the North for fall during covid and spent 10 min every morning outside simply being in that smell. I tell students, English literature only makes sense in the context of seasons and their scents.
Currently, almost every MN resident is breathing in and thinking “Ah, there’s fall.” Temps and dew-points dropped, breezes kicked in. It’s heavenly. And it can stay like this until Christmas for all I care.
As a Floridian, I ask: wtf is fall?
Oh, yeah, this is a real thing I learned when I moved from Florida, where I grew up, to Seattle!
I wonder if the smell of fall is the start of the foliage dying combined with the shifting temps as the days get shorter. Like, you can smell the decay of fallen leaves as you get further into autumn, just like you can smell the sweetness of plant buds in the spring.
Having grown up in the Bay Area, to me rain feels like Christmas. Even though my whole adult life I lived in MT & WY with harsh winters but rain feels like Christmas. Now that we're back in CA the kids miss the snow.
Here in Missouri I just caught my first, faint whiff of fall a couple days ago. Can't really describe it but it's real. It's a signal to take stock and prep for what's coming. Garden, house, life, and all the rest.
There was a tree or shrub or something that smelled SO good on campus when I was in college. Only in September! Whenever I smell something similar it feels like back to school time. No idea what it was.
I walked out of work yesterday and smelled the air and my brain immediately said “fall is here” gotta love deciduous trees they know how to set the mood.
Lmao. Yeah, you don’t smell that smell in Houston until October
I love fall - and it's probably really just embellished fantasy in my head, but it does have a smell and a feel to me (mid-Atlantic area). In my mind, it's like the end of an 80s movie (Big, maybe?).. With the tree lined empty street, leaves by the curbs, light shifting through the branches
It doesn't smell like fall yet to me (northeast WI) but the drop in temperature sure feels like it. And yes, fallen, wet, decaying leaves have a specific scent & it's my favorite scent in the world. Incredibly sexy scent.
