When you live in the country, you are treated to a variety of scents and odors. Some of the smells add to the delights of country life. To me, some of the nicer scents of flowers and garden plants are finer than the fragrances of expensive perfumes. Of course certain odors are of such raunchy pungency as to challenge one’s endurance of country life! When smells are nice, I think of them as scents.

If they are obnoxious, they are odors.

I especially enjoy this time of year, springtime, since the cold scents of winter snows have given way to fresh air. Most of our spring mornings are a bit chipper, and when I go out to bring in the newspaper, I like to take in the crisp, cool air, which may have at least a hint of the fragrance of the blooms in the trees or even the stronger pungency of lilies in the flower bed. The spring air breathes in with a moistness that will be missing when summer comes. Of course, summer will have its own enjoyable scents, like the scent of mown hay drying in the field, ready for baling.

Some people may think me weird for some of the scents I enjoy. For instance, our lawn grass is growing briskly right now, and I have de-winterized my lawn mowers and am fullyinto mowing the lawns.

Even a lawn mower has certain “fragrances.” I had to charge the battery on my rider to get it going. Some batteries give off a little acid pungency, especially as they are being charged, and even the corrosion on the battery terminals puts off a sort of sweet bitter smell. Then rises the aroma of engine oil as one checks the dipstick level. The aroma of oil from the engine case is a little different from the scent of new oil. I like them all. I don’t really like the odor of gasoline, especially when it clings to my hands, but I do like the scents that surround a running motor, working hard. I like the scents and sounds of my riding mower as it settles down to power through tall grass. The hot motor scents combined with the juicy smells of sliced grass form an interesting potency.

As I was growing up on our farm on Otter Creek, nearly every day had me walking along the creek or crossing through the water.

Our day pasture for the cows was usually the back side of the farm, on the eastside of the creek. To bring in the cows for milking, I would walk across the bottom fields east of the house, across a dry creek bed, to find the cows in the east pasture. Since I didn’t want to bring them through the alfalfa hayfield, I would drive the herd to the south end of the farm, crossing the stream of water twice as we came around to the milking barn. There is a certain aroma to the water itself, and that combines with the odors of weeds and flowers along the banks, the pungency of cow piles along the path, and sometimes the stench of a decaying small animal or bird or snake carcass along the way. In the mix, the individual ingredients don’t necessarily smell good, but the mix of scents somehow leaves me with pleasant memories.

I think many farmers enjoy the aromas of the plowed ground. It may be an acquired taste in scents, but many of us enjoy the fragrance of the stirred earth as we till the fields or work the soil in the garden. To me even the “fragrance” of decomposed material from the compost heap has that good rich smell to it, a reminder of the constant recycling and re-enrichening of the earth which goes on in the world of organic materials. I can’t say I really enjoy the pungency of chemical spraysor fertilizers as much as the more natural fertilizers like composted leaves or composted cow manure. Of course when you work with decomposing stuff you may occasionally expose it at a rank stage of the process, and there isn’t much pleasant about the stinks you release then.

Some of the farm scents that I associate with 1940’s memories are rarely encountered now. The horse stalls in our big barn had distinctive combinations of scents, the natural odors of the horses, sweat and all, the odor of oats and other grain feed and the fragrance of hay in the mangers, the smell of the leather harness and harness oils, the oily, burning scents given off by our old coal-oil lantern, the potent smell of lineament, even the distinctive pungency of horse droppings. I even remember the smell of the spindle grease we used for the old wooden-wheeled wagons. I don’t find any smells quite like that today - not that it was that attractive back then!

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Jerry Nichols, a native of Pea Ridge, is a retired Methodist minister with a passion for history. He is vice president of the Pea Ridge Historical Society. He can be contacted by e-mail at [email protected], or call 621-1621.

Community, Pages 5 on 04/28/2010