There is nothing like a smell to stir old memories. Smells are surer than sounds or sights to make the heart strings twang. They have that achingly familiar power to evoke the past. And a good strong whiff can stab you in the heart with pain, longing and remembrance. For the old timers, most of the once familiar smells have become elusive and rare, to be sought out or stumbled upon.
Like the smell of warm foaming milk or the poignant and wordless odor of dandelions. Or the acrid fumes of potash and lye of steaming kettles. Like the smell of an oil lamp or the crisp, blue smell of hickory smoke.
For many mountain folk, the smells of an old fashioned, non-deodorized barn are part of their heritage – the acid fragrance of manure, mingling with the sweetness of hay, the clean sharp odor of leather, a horse’s pared hoof, oats and bran. Fertilizers now are non-organic and hence the farmlands odorless.
The wonderful aroma and scents and smells of a grandma’s kitchen have been snatched up by ventilation hoods and either absorbed chemically or shot high into the air. Today’s pantry is no long the haunting and nostalgic fusion of delicious smells that pervaded the atmosphere of grandma’s pantry. There is nothing about it to whip the senses – nothing heady or pungent or sharp. Gone are the odors of cinnamon, pepper, smoked ham and cloves.
There are no longer the old time kitchen smells – of baking bread, buckwheat batter and black sorghum molasses, kerosene and linoleum, the clean ground strength of fresh ground coffee, of vanilla in cake dough, of fresh cut stove-wood and pine kindling in the wood box by the stove.
Something has gone too from the house that whetted a body’s appetite. There was a time that Rip Van Winkle could have told by the smells whether it was breakfast, lunch or dinner. Somehow the smell of breakfast has lost its pungency. The smells of country sausage frying, ham and eggs and wheat cakes are gone.
Something has gone too from the living room. There are no longer the good male smells…pipe tobacco and pine and leather and starched curtains.
And with the loss of the country store, the most exciting confusion of odors that ever prevailed anywhere. The scent was of nothing in particular and everything in general. It was in reality an odoriferous inventory of the entire stock – a mixture of hardware and groceries, dry goods and notions, onions, kerosene and soap. It was the glaze on the calicos and the starch in the checks, rooting cabbages and potatoes, spring onion sets, leather polish on new shoes, oil and wax on saddles, horse collars and buggy harness, the stove, peppermint and wintergreen candy. It was a blend of salt meats, paint on plow tools, cottonseed oil, honey and un-ground coffee. It was the smell of whittled wood and sawdust and shavings.
If you are a country man or luck enough to roam these rural byways, there are still smells that pleasure the nose and the soul. Like the smell of dew wet mornings, the cherry scent, the cool earth, damp moss, the wet loaming of the garden. Like the smell of burning leaves, the cidery smell of early apples on the ground, the wild tang of wild grapes, pressed cider pulp, the mint and goldenrod smell of tall weeds recently mowed. The smell of rain bearing winds, frosts sharp and quick as driven nails, the cool fern smell near springs, the elusive vast seductive and exciting smell of the hills blooming in the dusk.
Ah, those wonderful smells!