• There was a time when rain was more than weather. It was an event. A moment the whole day bent around. A pause in the noise. A gift.
  • Nobody opens their palms to the sky anymore. No one talks about petrichor. We’ve forgotten what rain is supposed to feel like.

There was a time when rain was more than weather. It was an event. A moment the whole day bent around. A pause in the noise. A gift.

In the countryside, the first signs were quiet—the breeze would still, the clouds would gather, and then, as the first drops landed, that familiar scent would rise from the soil. Petrichor.

The smell of thirsty earth welcoming rain like a long-lost friend. It was calming, grounding, and strangely intimate. You didn’t need anyone to explain it. You just felt it.Children would burst out of houses barefoot, laughing through puddles, their shoulders soaked, their teeth chattering, but their joy unbothered.

Photo| Courtesy: Foluke's African Skies

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Mothers would gather clothes off the line in hurried armfuls, while kettles hissed to life in smoky kitchens.

Elders sat by windows, their eyes quietly scanning the fields, their hearts steady with the knowledge that the crops would live another week.

Back then, rain meant rest. It meant storytelling around a dim lantern. It meant that the world would slow down, if only for a while. The roof would sing its metallic rhythm, frogs would call out in harmony, and the scent of wet soil would drift through the air like a blessing.

Now, it’s different.

In towns and cities, rain is met with groans. It means traffic, soaked shoes, blackouts, flooded trenches, stalled engines. It means rushing. It means checking your phone to see how long it’ll last. Nobody opens their palms to the sky anymore. No one talks about petrichor. We’ve forgotten what rain is supposed to feel like.

We’ve paved over the earth so completely that even the smell of it has become rare. Children now grow up thinking of rain as something to fear, to run from—not something to dance in. Somewhere along the way, our relationship with the natural world shifted from intimacy to inconvenience.

But every once in a while—on a quiet morning or in the stillness of evening—when the first drops begin to fall and that earthy scent rises again, memory returns. You breathe it in, and it takes you back. Not to a place, but to a feeling. Something deep and wordless. A kind of remembering.

And in that moment, however brief, the rain means something again.