That Florida Smell

It smelled like Florida this morning. I’ve noticed this phenomenon ever since returning home to Minnesota from south Florida in 1975. For just a few weeks every year, during the transition from late spring to early summer, it happens.

When the early morning temperature is warm, but not too warm, and the humidity is high enough to add some water to the air, but not so high as to become overpowering to the point where you can’t catch your breath, and you add in the gentlest of southerly breezes to mix everything around, then the magic happens: a Florida smell.

Of course that wondrous smell lacks the ocean-sweet taste of salt on your tongue, but I’ll still take it.

Sadly

but maybe perfectly?

the smell only lasts for a short time each morning, and how long the smell lasts is iffy and can change from day to day. The sun and the humidity aren’t in perfect synch, or the sun rises up just enough to raise the temp 1/10” of a degree, or burn off some of that humidity, or the breeze dies down, and boom, it’s gone. Or worse, it never happened.

Insert heart here. I love the Florida smell.

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Just so a person shouldn’t get lost in extravagant fantasy and overindulge in a chimerical smell that can transport him back in time almost 40 years is the downtown summer rot smell. The downtown rot smell begins once the snow melts and generally lasts until the year’s first freeze. That tangy toxic funk made up of equal parts diesel exhaust and rotting garbage spilling from overflowing, and seemingly forgotten, trashcans.