Walking the Maxwell Farm loop the other morning, I caught a vagrant whiff of cows on the breeze and I don’t mean cows’ breath. I had a teacher once who insisted that the shit of ungulates was not offensive, but he wasn’t a dairyman and I suspect had never been inside a cow barn in deep August. But the encounter reminded me how evocative smells are and how they are sometimes lost in the welter of other kinds of description we use in our writing.
I have a very distinct memory of tarry lines (ropes) in the loft of the building we used on rainy days when it was too wet to be out learning to sail. Generations of nautical types had stored all sorts of odds and ends of rope in the loft. The tarry smell marked how old the space was since tar hadn't been used for line protection for many decades. We'd crawl up in the loft to get away from close supervision. I don't have detailed memories of what we did up there - just that lovely smell. Like Lapsang Souchon tea...
I have a very distinct memory of tarry lines (ropes) in the loft of the building we used on rainy days when it was too wet to be out learning to sail. Generations of nautical types had stored all sorts of odds and ends of rope in the loft. The tarry smell marked how old the space was since tar hadn't been used for line protection for many decades. We'd crawl up in the loft to get away from close supervision. I don't have detailed memories of what we did up there - just that lovely smell. Like Lapsang Souchon tea...