It Smells Like Worms Out There

Oh certain Spring days, when the temperature is warm and the air is full of rain.

It smells like worms outside.

You didn’t know that it could smell like worms?

Well it can. At least according to my friend Nancy it can.

Ah Nancy. She lived just down the street from me 6th grade through freshman year in college. We would walk to school together….until we learned to drive that is. I would walk the two blocks to her house and arrive to find her in the same state every day….

Late.

Guzzling her glass of WHOLE milk and eating two, not one but TWO, Double Fudge Frosted Pop Tarts.

Two of them. Every day. I don’t like those kinds of pop tarts but I was still envious. Perhaps it was just the whole milk.

But I digress.

Once Nancy had eaten her pop tarts, drunk her milk and disposed of the inevitable milk moustache we walked to school. An uneventful half mile to Edison Jr. Hi or mile to the high school. All would be fine and dandy. We would talk boys and stuff (I have no idea really what we talked about).

All would be fine and dandy except on the days when it had rained. And then……

There would be worms.

Now I don’t have a great aversion to worms. I like them actually because they are helpful in the garden and they make the soil happy and you can snap them in two to make two worms and they make a lovely squishy sound when you step on the really big ones and……

Ummmmmm……..

Never mind about that.

I didn’t mind worms on rainy days but Nancy did. And when there were a ton of worms on the side walk then the trip to school was more like tip toeing through the dog poop, I mean the tulips. Nan didn’t want to step on any of them (I had no such qualms) nor did she like the “worm smell” that seemed to flow, like the 10th plague of Egypt, along the ground as we walked to school.

That half a mile became as difficult to traverse as the Khumbu Icefall going up Mt. Everest. I could see the final destination but I never thought I would get there because we had to walk past,around,over,beside all the worms along the way, all the time holding our breathe against the dreaded worm smell.

It smells like worms today.

And I must go out into it.

Help me.