Not only does spring come with warm weather and new smells, the scent of budding trees, blooming flowers and lilacs on the breeze, but it comes with new sounds too. With the warm weather, we're eager to open the windows, to let in the fresh air and get some circulation inside where we've been used to the stagnancy of a sealed compartment. And with those open windows, we get the voices of the neighbors, the hydraulics of the garbage trucks, the swish of the street sweepers. On the road, windows down, sunroof open, music from our speakers mixes with that of the cars next to us at the red light and we hear the mufflers and the clanking and the revving of every clunker, every truck, every 300-horsepower GT engine.

And at night, the rain pounds the driveway like the popping of bubble wrap and it flows off the roof in a cascade that keeps us up at 4 a.m. Petrichor, they call it, that pleasant smell that accompanies the first rain after a dry spell. Sometimes, it smells like the desert.