What smells do you remember from your childhood? Is it even a topic worthy of a short story? Growing up on a farm, the smells I remember are related to farming. My parents used to tell the story of when they were first married and lived in a small one bedroom farmhouse...how skunks 'nested' under their house. Apparently the skunks caused quite a stink before they were able to get them out and properly close the crawl space under the house.Science knows that smell, memory, and emotions are very connected, although they really do not understand why or how. But it seems that memory is easily triggered by a smell. If I encounter a smell from my childhood, I can be right back to one of those moments when I was originally immersed in the odor.
Of course, living on a farm, the smell I remember most is the smell of manure. Because we had a small dairy, moving manure was a routine chore. Cleaning the barn or the loafing shed was a daily task. We stored the manure for the spring. And when spring came, we used the manure-spreader to fertilize much of the small acreage we farmed. It is not an agreeable smell, and living and working with manure every day of my young life required some adaptation.
I remember the smell of fresh straw and drying alfalfa (hay). In the early fall when local farmers harvest their grain, the smell of straw is strong and it reminds me of my childhood. Straw was used to create clean bedding for our animals and I associated cleanliness and freshness with the smell of straw.
Once a week we irrigated our small farm and that required bringing water from a canal about a mile from our home [a Dry Farmer will use irrigation water when it is present]. When we first moved to our farm, the ditches hardly existed...you could say that the previous owners were dry farmers because they could not get water to their farm. But my father knew how to create and maintain ditches. He and his sons and daughter would work between "waterings" to "clean the ditches". This was done by standing in the ditch and using a shovel to skim the sides of the ditch, then piling the shovelful of dirt and weeds up onto the ditch bank. This kept weeds to a minimum in the ditch and kept the ditch sides built up. What I remember, working in the hot and humid summers, was the smell of mint on those ditchbanks. It grew wild, as a weed, and was a very strong smell. Today, as local mint farmers grow and harvest mint as a crop, I am instantly returned to those days of cleaning ditches.
I remember the smell of rain (usually welcomed) and sage brush (especially when it rained and the wind blew) and potatoes vines (because we always grew and tended a few acres of red potatoes). But one odd smell that stuck in my nose was the smell of dried beet pulp. We used beet pulp as an additive to the grain we fed our dairy animals, and mixed it with the grain in a 55 gallon drum by hand. There was always a lot of dust and beet pulp has a very strong odor. It is ironic because today I live close to a sugar beet processing plant and when the wind is right I can smell the beets (and the beet pulp) just like when I was a kid.
These are not likely the smells that others would talk about (not the sweet smells of lilacs and roses, though I do remember those too). But these are the smells from my childhood...the common smells...the smells that, to this day, take me back to the ages between 9 and 18.
