Image by roboppy

I thought of my great-Aunt Belle the other day while frying Spam. She spent all of her long life in the northeastern hills of Pennsylvania busily cooking, gardening, teaching, living. Starting when I was about six and continuing for the next seven years, I made an almost daily trek the half-mile to her house, sometimes on foot through the woods, now and then on horseback through the fields, or most often pedaling my Western Flyer out the rough dirt road.

Together, Aunt Belle and I baked cookies, picked corn, weeded carrots, made Christmas presents, fed calves, and cleaned cupboards. Most of our conversations slid lightly from cats to cows, from school plays to picnics, from ice skating to the weather. At times, we grew more serious, welcoming Alaska and Hawaii into the family, wishing John Glenn bon voyage, worrying about what Fidel might do to us, wondering about Martin’s dream speech, and joining Walter to say good-bye to JFK.

Like most farm wives, my aunt knew how to save a penny in all that she did. The work was ever present – darning socks, patching jeans, hanging out wash, growing a large garden, canning fruits and vegetables, picking berries, plucking chickens, hacking up home-grown beef, skinning rabbits and squirrels, cleaning fish, making do. In some ways, she stretched a penny beyond recognition. I especially remember eyeing our chocolate chip cookies set out to cool on the counter. My recurring challenge? Find the one with more than three chocolate chips! She economized at dinnertime too. Her meals were often a conglomeration of the previous several nights’ meals, kind of mystery casseroles. Like the Spam, they were tasty, but better not to ask what was in them or how old the ingredients were!

As I opened the Spam can recently and picked up a knife, I smiled to myself, thinking of Aunt Belle and her subtle influences on my life so many years later. With three sons and a hungry husband, our Spam slices grew in number over the years from seven to eight to nine to ten, until that little block of meat yielded eleven very thin slices to feed my family of five. I rationed the slices; three for Gary, two each for the boys and me. The funny thing is that it just never occurred to me to buy two cans! Aunt Belle would understand.

She’d understand about the refrigerator too. We bought a new one earlier this year, so when I called Tyler in California, I mentioned the new purchase. “Does it have a light in it?” he immediately asked. His question puzzled me for a minute until I realized he was teasing. Our old refrigerator light burned out about fifteen years ago, and I never replaced it. Did you know that if you put your eyes level with each shelf and squint you can see pretty well all the way to the back without a light?

Today, I’m making chocolate chip cookies. The recipe calls for a twelve ounce bag of chips, but as always, I’ll ignore old Toll House and side more closely with my aunt’s count. Tonight, when it’s cookie time, I’ll just try to find the ones with more than five chips before Gary gets to them. Now, about that missing light in the oven…

Missing my Aunt Belle.

Image by Aunt Owwee

My eyes shift quickly to the left side of the road as I round the sharp curve, drawn to a boy dressed in hot orange, standing in stark contrast to the dull December browns of the Pennsylvania fields. Three more men flash by my window at sixty-yard intervals, each in orange garb and with rifles slung over their shoulders, waiting to move into the woods. “Oh yeah, it’s the first day of deer season and school’s closed,” I remind myself, and feel a surge of envy as the last man disappears from my rear-view mirror.

Deer hunting! Thirty-some years after hanging up my rifle, that first-day urge still tugs at me even as I head to the mall. My mind wanders into the fields and forests of my childhood. Well actually, perhaps because I’ve skipped breakfast, my first thoughts are of our old farmhouse kitchen table with plates piled high with fried deer steak and hot pancakes, pitcher of homemade brown sugar syrup ready for pouring. “Wish I had some right now,” I think, remembering a time long ago when our farm neighbors from “The Hill” gathered together after the season to share this simple fare, swapping tall tales of the big bucks that got away, playing pitch, and just plain visiting.

My brother hated hunting, but I embraced it, impatiently waiting to turn twelve, and the thrill of my first hunting license wasn’t matched until four years later at the DMV. My dad welcomed my interest in his passion. In the weeks before the season opened, we’d cruise the back roads surrounding our farm, beaming a spotlight into the far corners of the fields, assessing the number of deer and the promise of trophy racks. And then, a couple of days before the Big Day, we’d sight our rifles in by leaning against a porch beam and shooting across the lawn into the black-ringed paper target.

My first gun, a 38-40 Winchester was Gene Autry and John Wayne movie-cool, with a Rifleman-like lever action. For the first three or four years of hunting, no matter where I stood – open field, full woods, or thick brush, the deer came to me, somehow knowing that I couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn with that old 38-40. My father finally bought me a 30-30 Savage, with bolt action. I could hit the barn, but I didn’t feel nearly as cool!

A few more miles down the road, I spy another hunter; a young girl, standing with rifle butt sitting on the toe of her boot, slightly bent over and drawn into herself. “Yeah, I remember standing like that for hours! Freezing, but not wanting to admit it or give up for the day.” After a few years of hunting with a gang of relatives and neighbors, my dad and I settled into a smaller gang – just the two of us. Outside before daylight, we’d take turns during the day standing in our special deer runs while the other walked through the woods to stir up the deer. Alternating between cold-to-the-bone standing and sweaty-hot-in-the-cold walking, we’d cover every inch of our hundred-fifty acres and much of the neighbors’, hope still alive, only driven homeward by darkness.

“I’ve got to get the gun-cleaning fluid out someday soon and take a whiff of it,” I think, weaving into the left lane of traffic. “I can’t quite bring back the smell of Hoppe’s, but I know it smelled really good.” Everything smelled, tasted, and felt good after a long day in the cold – often in snow, sleet, or rain, lugging a rifle up hill and down, fighting through briar patches that grabbed and held on, and climbing over slippery stone walls. Hot dogs frying in butter smelled better than steak on a grill. Baked beans from a can and warmed up on the stove called out as strongly as any gourmet dish Julia Child could cook up. Coconut washboard cookies rivaled fresh crème Brule as the perfect dessert. Feast complete, my dad would light his pipe, while I snuggled under an old quilt on the couch, fading in and out of an out-of-the-cold, body-so-tired sleep as Walter Cronkite read the news.

I remember clearly the day when my 30-30 finally found its mark…the thrill of a snapping twig, slipping the safe off and raising the rifle, waiting, straining to see through snowflakes, aiming, heart racing, adrenaline shutting out the cold, waiting a few more agonizing seconds to make sure, squeezing the trigger, barely feeling the recoil, ejecting the bullet, aiming again, squeezing again, watching helplessly as the deer disappeared, running awkwardly after it in heavy boots, struggling to keep upright on the frozen tufts of dead grass… My father, hampered by his color blindness, looked to me to follow the trail of bright red drops on the brown forest floor. Finally sighting the downed deer, he strode up to it, proud of his daughter and pleased with our day. Pulling out his knife to claim it as ours, he warmed his hands in the rising steam as he worked.

As I slam the Buick door and head for Macys, my attention starts to shift to the Christmas presents waiting inside. One last first-day thought crosses my mind – a reminder to myself to call my father, a master hunter still at it in his eighty-third year. I’ll say, “Thanks, dad, we were great hunters together, weren’t we?”

I eventually lost interest in hunting, growing too soft to stand in freezing weather, swayed by a husband who felt it too dangerous, busy with job and family, and reaching a point, as my youngest son put it, where I didn’t want to kill those forest creatures! For several years though, hunting created a strong bond between my father and me, sorely needed right after a divorce which could have separated us. My love for the land and its wildlife also grew from those hours spent traipsing through the fields and forests of northeastern Pennsylvania…another reason that home always beckons.

Image by supergiball

As I sat on the picnic bench in front of the Sundae Time in Troy savoring the small waffle cone of raspberry swirl, another familiar smell caught my attention. I lifted my head and sucked in the aroma and for a moment felt the heart-tug of my childhood memories. Oh, the sweet smell of cows!

My husband and I spent the next ten minutes swapping “the best of” in farm smells. For those of you who grew up on a farm, this will be a walk down memory lane. For all others, you can wonder, is she really serious! Here are my Top 15 Favorite Farm Smells, not necessarily all good, but all distinctively memorable:

House smells

1. Homemade everything – homemade bread baking; hot, bubbling apple, cherry, blackberry, huckleberry pies made from fruit picked on the farm or on the local mountain; smell of the brine in the hand-cranked ice cream maker filled with milk straight from the cow; fried deer steak and pancakes topped with boiled brown-sugar syrup; the first-blast good smells when you open home-canned jars of home-grown peaches, beets, pears, tomatoes, apples, pickles, and cherries; baking powder biscuits straight from the oven, dripping with lots of butter and homemade wild strawberry jam. Oh, yeah…
2. Bacon, sausage, home fries, and eggs frying on the stove every morning for breakfast – a hearty fare for hard-working men going to the fields and to the barn; I still love that smell on the two or three times a year when we leave the cereal in the cupboard!
3. Porter’s Salve -a traveling salesman showed up on the farm every now and then peddling the green and white tins with salve claiming to benefit bruises, rough skin, insect bites, sunburn and local irritations; recommended for man or beast. Blindfold me and wave 100 concoctions under my nose, and I’ll pick the Porter’s salve out. The smell is that memorable!
4. The dank, wet, musty smell of most farmhouse cellars – no poured concrete or cinder blocks, just field stone walls and earth floors; perfect spot for storing canned goods and produce from the garden, but no place to linger.

Barn Smells

5. Corn silage – tightly packed into a silo, the chopped corn ferments to such perfection that my husband and I agree that this one tops the list for good farm smells. Oh, to take just one strong whiff up a silo again someday…
6. Cow feed with molasses – I doubt there’s a farm kid alive or dead who hasn’t taken a taste of this sweet-smelling mixture at least once!
7. Milk powder mixed with water for calves being weaned from their mothers – easy to smell as you bent close to the pail to get the calf to drink by sucking on your fingers.
8. Whitewash, a mixture of lime and chalk – sprayed on the walls, floor, and ceiling of the main barn floor to sanitize surfaces, drive out spiders, and brighten things up; the white wash momentarily masked all the other ordinary barn smells.
9. Fly spray – overpowering, eye-watering stench for a few minutes after spraying all the cows while in their stanchions in the barn.
10. Fresh cream collecting on top of the strainer over the milk can in the milk house.
11. The granary – sweet smell of oats, sometimes dusty, sometimes musty; as kids we played in the oat bins!

Outside Smells

12. New mown hay – this still takes my breath away when I drive through the country; roll your window down next time you pass a field and take it all in.
13. Singed chicken feathers – burning the fine feathers off after plucking the main ones. Yuck!
14. Creosote added to corn before planting to discourage birds, animals, and worms from eating the kernels.
15. Manure – no, you can’t ignore this basic olfactory delight of family farm life, and I openly proclaim to the world that horse and cow shit on a small farm smells good! Sorry, but no one on the farm called it manure!

Gone are all the dairy farms that lined the roads for miles on either side of my father’s land. Barns sit empty, many with caved-in roofs and missing boards. Former pastures grow wild again with weeds and brush, with no Holsteins, Jerseys or Guernseys to graze them tidy. My generation, the sons and daughters of farmers, found other ways to make a living, most not requiring the 24/7 commitment of the family farm.

The Troy Fair opens in July, with folks from the few remaining local farms gathering with their animals and produce to compete for prizes, bragging rights, and a week of camaraderie. I’ll spend a few moments walking through the cow barns, breathing in those smells that still possess the power to take me back home again. Oh, the sweet smells of childhood!

On a more serious note, today’s huge factory farms conjure up other adjectives – pungent, putrid, unbearable, foul, and appalling. I’m a meat-lover, and have no qualms about raising animals for consumption, but I admit to a wave of conscience about the conditions that factory-farm animals endure in order for me to enjoy my steak sandwich, lemon chicken, or sliced ham. Also in question is the right of these farms to impose their nauseating smells and real or potential water pollution on neighboring properties. Sounds like this topic may show up in a future post…