This month, my poetry sisters and I met on Zoom (where else?) to write poems together. Our prompt was to select one or more words from the list of words that first appeared in the year of our birth.
Some candidates for 1964 included barf bag, gender identity, homophobia, mack daddy, and sucker punch.
As it turns out, being born in April of 1964, I am almost as old as dirt.
Or rather, as old as the word used to describe the scent that rises from dirt as the rain begins to fall. That word—one of my favorite words and scents, as it turns out—is petrichor.
“Petrichor: a distinctive, earthy, usually pleasant odor that is associated with rainfall especially when following a warm, dry period and that arises from a combination of volatile plant oils and geosmin released from the soil into the air and by ozone carried by downdrafts ”
Petrichor entered the English language in March of 1964, less than a month before my birth, when Australian scientists Isabel Joy Bear and Richard G. Thomas published an article,“Nature of Argillaceous Odour,” in the journal Nature.
If you want to see exactly how a raindrop on warm, dry rock or soil creates aerosols that rise and distribute the scent we now call petrichor into the air, I highly recommend this link, which includes research from MIT.
I of course fell down a research rabbit hole on this, and have learned that one of the key components of petrichor is a sesquiterpene called geosmin, which is an essential oil that contributes to the earthy flavor of beetroot, and the earthy scent of petrichor.
The word petrichor was coined by research Richard Thomas, composed from petra (rock) or petros (stone) and ichor (the fluid that ran through the veins of Greek gods). Basically, it is “the blood of stones”, so don’t let anyone tell you that you can’t get blood from a stone.
