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Smells take us back in time

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By Tom Stafford, Staff Writer 7:11 PM Saturday, July 4, 2009

A month ago, my brother-in-law Jon Clouse and I were driving west on Menchofer Road not far from Coldwater, Ohio, discussing the relative bouquets of manures.

Chicken manure, we agreed, was the worst with pig a close second.

Cows were, by-and-large ... large, but third.

As an aesthetic principle, however, we agreed that any of the varieties, if experienced with enough intensity, could peel the paint off a barn and serve as an appetite suppressant powerful enough to dramatically reduce the need for lap-band surgery.

Still, a manure-tinged fragrance of a more understated sort will always be linked to some of my fondest memories.

That came back to me a week or two later as I was skating on the bike path where it passes through Whitehall Farm north of Yellow Springs.

As the slight scent of cow manure mixed with scents of a muddy creek bed rose, my personal Way Back Machine took me to the early 1960s along Black Creek in Watton, a hamlet in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.

Just as the smell of the barn on my grandfather’s clothes mixed with snuff and my grandmother’s yeast rolls to create the smell of love, the smell of cow manure near a creek bed still speaks to me of carefree play.

While my parents taught summer school, they’d send us to the farm to spend time with my grandparents.

And as much as we all loved it, my grandmother would occasionally head off her urge to use her rolling pin on my brother and me by sending us off with metal lunch pails of food and Mason jars of drink to lunch by the creek.

My cousin Michael, the cousin closest to us in age, often would join us.

A soft touch, even then, I, the youngest, would be sent back up the hill for more supplies by Bill and Michael, only to be scolded by my grandmother for letting them get away with it again.

When I returned to the creek and its darkish but clear water, I could spot small fish. And even years later, the echoes in the culvert that ran under Michigan 28 speak to me of cool solitude.

That memory flows downstream to another — the memory of holding shiny metal pails and standing beside a fence line along a dirt road picking raspberries.

My grandmother would use junket and sometimes rhubarb from her garden to create something called purroe (roll the rs) in Finnish.

The sweet and fresh tasting desserts were served warm with real cream from the cows in the barn. But as much as we loved her dessert, sun-warmed berries that never made it to the pail came a close second.

When I was younger, I heard people who said their departed relatives were with them still with a skeptical ear. They were gone, I said to myself, and that was that.

But when I smell that smell along the bike path, they are with me again. They are with me still. And I know they will be with me as long as my memory lasts.

Contact this reporter at (937) 328-0368 or tstafford@coxohio.com.

Tom STAFFORD

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