"Tonight I can smell the season the way it's usually only possible to at the very first moments of its return, before you're used to it, when you've forgotten its smell, then there it is back in the air and the flow of things shifting and resettling again." ~ Ali Smith (The Whole Story & Other Stories)
Urbanization had dulled our sense of summer smells. This summer, at Fat Hummingbird Farm, is the first complete summertime since we have moved here. We have become aware, again, of the smells of the season in a way I, in particular, have not experienced since we lived on the Prairies. Back in the urban/suburban busyness that we moved from, the prevalent summer smells were that of hot gas fumes as you idled in traffic, or that arid, barren and chemical smell of hot concrete, or the biting odour of a car air conditioner - much like the air on an airplane. There were even a couple of houses on our street whose lawns off-gassed the nose-tweaking fertilizer scent very reminiscent of the white, waxy Weedex bars my father would have us kids drag up and down the lawn when I was a kid.
As the season here at the Farm has progressed the scents particular to summer in the country have come as new perfumes or as reminiscences of my partially rural childhood.
Right now everyone seems to be haying. It was a wet spring so getting the crop in was delayed and even dicey. Now tractors rattle up and down our road on a continual basis, hauling trailers loaded to a precarious degree with fat golden rounds of hay. I love the smell of new mown hay. When I am out driving alone I like to roll down the windows and take great gulping inhalations of that wonderful sweet smell. The hay bales, themselves, have a different odour - an underlying sweet but rotting smell that reminds me of the haylofts I played in as a child. Farmers don't pile hay by the barn in huge flaxen mounds anymore. Nothing was more thrilling than taking a running leap out of the mow window and landing in that pile of gold.
Another late summer smell is that of corn silage as it starts to ferment in the silos or under those ubiquitous white tarps peppered with old black tires. Certain kinds of beer still elicit for me the smell of the fermented corn liquor that Grampa Crawford used to make. He hid it in his workshop and swore us kids to secrecy. Gramma Crawford was a deacon for some church or other, he said, and would not approve. But a little corn never hurt anybody, he proclaimed.
The summer smell of sweaty horses is a lovely smell - like a fine cheese. But when I have visited horses up and down our road the less lovely smell that is germane only to summer, I think, is the overpowering, eye-watering stench of fly spray. Ooooooh! And then, of course summer is when farm dogs have more frequent interactions with other creatures. Most farm dogs don't really smell that great in the summer either because they have had a run-in with a skunk or have rolled in something unsavoury decomposed to perfection in the summer humidity.
Barn wood sweats in the summer too. You can smell the resin and the urine and that slightly greasy smell of worked wood. You can smell the blood-like smell of rusting nails deep in the seams of the wood.
We have been planting a lot of gardens this summer. I love the smell of the earth when you dig it up to put in perennials. You can inhale that slightly garlic-like smell of earthworms and the scent of the decomposed parts of other plants from years before. The soil is, by turns, wet and dry and loamy and alkaline - and sometimes a dusty acid that you can taste sharply on your tongue. One of the flower beds is under the Black Locust trees. The lovely sweet and dusky smell of the Black Locust trees in bloom - attracting bees, butterflies and hummingbirds alike; dripping its plant-honey onto the back of our shirts, sticking in our hair.
Some plant smells elicit memories. Like the smell of the wild roses. Sweet and pleasing. And the lilacs that bloomed briefly at the beginning of summer. Both the roses and the lilacs remind me of a perfume my mother used to wear - White Shoulders. I was allowed to take a sniff when she held the bottle out to me as she was primping for a night out. But I was never allowed to touch the bottle and, most certainly, could never ask for a dab of the perfume on my own earlobe. White Shoulders was my mother's signature. It drifted after her presence like a shadow when she walked through a room.
Another memory when I walk on the path and pass the area where our neighbours have their pigs pastured. All summer the pigs have been rooting up the underbrush and turning the soil. The smell of organic materials and exposed roots and insipid darkness evokes the cold, dark essence of the cave my brother and I once found to play in when children - where roots hung from the ceiling and dust dribbled down the walls and there was the sound of a constant wet trickle that we never found the source of.
In winter, washed clothes drape wooden racks situated throughout the house. In summer laundry hangs on the line. And I love the smell of line-dried clothes. I like to bury my face in the clothing that has been scented by sun and by the wind. A little tang of salt sometimes if the wind has been strong over the mountain from the bay. Or sometimes the laundry may have picked up odour from the soil (via the air), especially after a rainfall. Geosmin, which literally translates to 'earth smell', is an organic compound with a distinct earthy flavour and aroma. It's responsible for the earthy taste of beets and contributes to the strong scent that occurs in the air when rains falls after a dry spell of weather - the petrichor (a word derived from that for stone and for the flow in the veins of Greek gods). Regardless of where the scents come from, you simply cannot put that smell into a dryer sheet of a bottle of laundry detergent.
The chokecherry bushes are blooming now. If you bruise the twigs or bark they smell distinctly like bitter almonds. The same smell as cyanide I suppose.
Summer is fading now at Fat Hummingbird Farm. I am starting to see a few yellow leaves and the plants in the gardens are starting to get that slightly exhausted look. It has been a particularly dry summer. The kind of parched dry that creates a warm, almost sexual, smell of sweat on ourselves after a day out in the hot sun and dust. When the cellar door opens into the warm air, however, the dank, chilly, musty air drifts out with the distinct odour of field stone walls and cold air - like that icy aroma inside a cave or beside a shadowed brook.
These summer nights have a special smell too. After a hot day where the bedclothes have been baking in the sun through the window, you get into your sheets and they smell like over-ironed shirts - hot and steamy and scorched. Just wait until the moon rises. The moonlight cools them and then they smell like river water.
(a special thank you to Liliana Caracas for asking me to write about the smells of summer)
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