by Sandra Szalinski
Some people think of farms as foul-smelling places. But that’s not what I remember. I grew up on a 40-acre, family farm in northwestern Pennsylvania in the 1950s. Our way of life on that farm was part of a different era, for which I have many fond memories, including those of scents and odors.
At the end of February, having just experienced bone chilling cold weather, I longed for spring. Spring is always a magical time, but on the farm, it was especially so. I sensed it coming, as the wind blew through the trees and over soggy wet fields, where it first picked up the scent of the soil that had been frozen but heaved open as the ice within it melted. The country air was clear, free of dust, vehicle exhaust, and industrial pollution. As the days grew longer, the wind carried the scents from blooming flowers and apple trees in our orchard. We opened the windows in our house and those sweet-smelling breezes drifted inside.
During our early years on the farm, my mother hung the laundry outside to dry. My father had sunk two, tall steel posts, a few feet apart, into holes he dug in the yard and filled with concrete to firmly anchor them. At the top of each one, he welded a cross bar, which considering his expertise as a skilled welder was not a complicated task, and fastened hooks on the ends of the cross bars and on the side of the house. Between the hooks, Mum strung the clothesline on which she hung the clothes. Since the lines were long and difficult to get fully taught, and the weight of the wet clothes caused the lines to sag, she had several poles to prop up the lines. Dad had made these poles from some straight saplings that he took from the woods, cut off the branches, and notched one end. If the wind were strong, Mum would struggle to get the bed sheets on the line and get the line propped up so the sheets wouldn’t touch the ground. Typically wearing a shirtwaist dress, often with a scarf tied around her head turban style to cover her curlers, she would get those sheets high off the ground, flapping like loosened sails in the breeze on a boat turning about. Oh, to lie between those cool, crisp percale sheets that held the fresh, sweet fragrance of spring!
Unpleasant odors were rare, but a rite of farm life in spring, fertilizing the garden, brought a familiar scent. For most of the year, our cows, horse, chickens, and other animals that we occasionally had, such as geese or turkeys, were free to roam. Animals, like people, have their own unique body odors, as does their manure, but spread over several acres of pasture, their odors were quickly absorbed by the environment and their waste nourished the soil and plants. During the harshest part of winter, the animals were kept in the barn and their stalls were cleaned at least once a day, twice a day for milk cows. Just outside the barn, Dad had a designated area for accumulating the cow and horse manure. Every spring, Dad and one of my brothers shoveled the smelly manure from the pile into a borrowed manure spreader. Driving his early 1940s, Ford 9N tractor, Dad spread the manure on the garden and plowed it under the soil to add nutrients for the vegetables that we planted later in the spring. We all noticed that odor of manure and accepted it as part of farm life, but it only lasted for a day or so.
In our yard, a large, purple lilac bush bloomed prodigiously year after year. Mum would keep a vase of cut lilacs on the dining room table, which filled the room with their lovely bouquet. Those blooms started to fade as the summer solstice arrived. By then the strawberry blossoms in our garden had turned into berries and soon I would be outside before breakfast every morning to gather the ripened ones. The scent and the flavor of those bright red, freshly picked, ripened on the vine strawberries on top of my bowl of Cheerios with fresh creamy milk from our Jersey cow was divine. We all loved strawberries, but Mum and Dad did not grow enough to satisfy our cravings. So, the whole family would pile into our 1949 Ford sedan and drive to a U-pick strawberry farm where we would pick many flats full of ripe strawberries. After sitting on the back porch cutting off the tops of the berries, Mum would put most of them in a stock pot on the kitchen stove, add sugar, and cook the berries into jam. As the boiling berries bubbled and sputtered, their delightful aroma wafted through our house.
Summer thunderstorms provided different smells before and after the storm. As black clouds gathered, the wind picked up, and lightening flashed in the sky, I knew a storm was coming. But I could smell it, too. I didn’t know it at the time, but prior to the rain falling, the sharp odor of ozone is in the air. Later, the rain leaves behind a musty whiff of damp earth, a scent more pleasant in the country than that in a city where the rain stirs up the grease and grime and other pollution that sticks to buildings, roads, and sidewalks.
Later in the summer, the aroma of fresh mown hay, lush and sweet, filled the air in farm country. I could smell it everywhere, from our yard, walking along the road, riding in the car with the windows down. As we children became capable we were expected to help Mum in the house and Dad outdoors. At age 13 or 14, I first helped cut the hay. I sat on a metal seat that was perched on top of the mower, which was pulled by the tractor that Dad drove. When we arrived at the end of the row I raised the mower blade by pulling a large metal lever and then lowered it after Dad made the turn. A few days after the hay had been cut, dried and baled, I drove the tractor through our hay field while Dad and my brother, in a cloud of dust, tossed and stacked bales onto a wagon. Dad would not let me lift hay bales since he believed that females were the weaker sex and should not be lifting heavy weights (as an older teen, I proved him wrong about that assumption). The dried grasses, a combination of timothy, clover, and birds-foot trefoil, had a different, more seasoned aroma, still distinct and pleasant.
My father’s parents also had a farm in Pennsylvania with an apple orchard much larger than ours. How we loved to go there in the autumn to gather apples for cider. The best apples for cider were those that were fully ripe, including those that had fallen on the ground, often bruised and surrounded by buzzing honey bees, which love to eat the overripe fruit. The luscious scent of the apples saturated the air and permeated our nostrils as we filled burlap sacks with apples and ate our fill of apples from the trees.
Dad took the bags of apples to a cider mill and a week or so later came home with a wooden barrel filled with cider, laden with the scent of apples. He rested the barrel on top of a couple of wooden saw horses in the barn and from the tap, we filled gallon jugs to bring the cider into the house for drinking. After a couple of weeks, the cider became fizzy and tasted even better. At some point, as the cider fermented and lost its sweet apple flavor, either we lost interest in drinking it or Dad would not allow us to drink any more, saying that he wanted to save the rest for vinegar. After a few months, the contents of the barrel were emptied into bottles and thus, Mum had the vinegar she needed for cooking and canning. Dad rinsed and returned the barrel to the mill.
The rituals of fall included raking leaves, and while the raking could be tiresome work, a large pile of leaves provided a great place to play. Diving into a mound of crisp red, yellow, and orange leaves, I became fully engulfed in their earthy, musty odor. And in those days, the smell of burning leaves and smoke was pervasive in late fall.
With the frosty chill of winter, outdoor scents and odors disappeared and often my nostrils were stung with icy cold air. With windows and doors closed, odors in the house and the barn seemed more pronounced. The holiday scents of bread, cakes, or a turkey in the oven and the fragrant pine tree in the living room largely overcame the occasional puff of acrid coal dust that drifted out of our living room coal stove when the fire was stoked. And the barn had a warm, earthy odor from the hay stacked along the walls. Even the scent of the cows and the horse was pleasant in that space.
The best part of winter came in frigid January, when Dad pulled up the floor boards in my bedroom and scooped honey combs away from the dormant bees, which had opportunistically found the perfect hive location by squeezing between loose clapboards on the side of our old frame farmhouse. He filled two large enamel-coated pots, one with golden colored clover honey, the other with dark brown buckwheat honey. In those days, our house did not have central heating, only the coal stove in the living room. The stove was made of cast iron and it was surrounded by an enameled steel shroud that was flat on top. It was the perfect place for Dad to set the pots, where the heat from the stove slowly melted the wax of the honey combs thereby releasing the sticky honey. The pots sat there for several days, during which the sweet fragrance of clover honey and the pungent earthy scent of buckwheat honey permeated the room. As the beeswax melted and floated to the top, Mum skimmed it off. When she wasn’t in the room, my brothers and I delighted in sampling the honey. Early in the process I would break off a piece of the honeycomb and chew it, releasing the honey in my mouth and eventually spitting out the ball of wax. Later, when there was more liquid, I would dip my finger into a pot for a tasty lick. After all the wax had melted and been removed, Mum ladled the honey into mason jars and used it in place of cane sugar. One of my favorite snacks was fresh baked bread, still warm from oven, slathered with homemade butter and covered with honey, especially the buckwheat.
My young life and the family farm are long gone. But now, when spring arrives, the scents are strong, even in my urban neighborhood, which bursts in colors and aromas from ornamental cherry trees blossoms, mounds of brilliant colored azaleas, and lilacs. And with the joy of spring, I know it won’t be long until I take my three young grandsons to local farms, first to pick strawberries, then later to pick blueberries and apples. And while they spend much of their time frolicking in the orchards, I’ll fill the buckets, inhale the sweet scents of the fruit, and daydream about the fragrant strawberry pies, blueberry pancakes, apple crisps, and other desserts that I’ll make for them.
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photo of the author cutting hay with with her father courtesy of Sandra Szalinski
Sandra Keifer Szalinski is a fledgling writer of stories about the farm life of her youth, two of which have recently been published https://farmerish.net/dad-and-old-bob/and https://farmerish.net/the-yellow-cow/. Prior to retiring from a 50-year career in engineering, she earned an MFA in creative writing from Goddard College. Ms. Szalinski lives with her husband near Philadelphia, where she gardens, explores nature with three young grandsons, and is at work on her novel The Yoxford Girl based on her mother’s life in WWII England.