The Smell of Smells

I Smelt it this morning--I wonder if you know the smell I mean?

It had rained hard during the night, and trees and bushes twinkled in
the sharp early sunshine like ballroom chandeliers. As soon as I stepped
out of doors I caught that faint but unmistakable musk in the air; that
dim, warm sweetness. It was the smell of summer, so wholly different
from the crisp tang of spring.

It is a drowsy, magical waft of warmth and fragrance. It comes only when
the leaves and vegetation have grown to a certain fullness and juice,
and when the sun bends in his orbit near enough to draw out all the
subtle vapors of field and woodland. It is a smell that rarely if ever
can be discerned in the city. It needs the wider air of the unhampered
earth for its circulation and play.

I don't know just why, but I associate that peculiar aroma of summer
with woodpiles and barnyards. Perhaps because in the area of a farmyard
the sunlight is caught and focused and glows with its fullest heat and
radiance. And it is in the grasp of the relentless sun that growing
things yield up their innermost vitality and emanate their fragrant
essence. I have seen fields of tobacco under a hot sun that smelt as
blithe as a room thick with blue Havana smoke. I remember a pile of
birch logs, heaped up behind a barn in Pike County, where that mellow
richness of summer flowed and quivered like a visible exhalation in the
air. It is the goodly soul of earth, rendering her health and sweetness
to her master, the sun.

Every one, I suppose, who is a fancier of smells, knows this blithe
perfume of the summer air that is so pleasant to the nostril almost any
fine forenoon from mid-June until August. It steals pungently through
the blue sparkle of the morning, fading away toward noon when the
moistness is dried out. But when one first issues from the house at
breakfast time it is at its highest savor. Irresistibly it suggests
worms and a tin can with the lid jaggedly bent back and a pitchfork
turning up the earth behind the cow stable. Fishing was first invented
when Adam smelt that odor in the air.

The first fishing morning--can't you imagine it! Has no one ever
celebrated it in verse or oils? The world all young and full of
unmitigated sweetness; the Garden of Eden bespangled with the early dew;
Adam scrabbling up a fistful of worm's and hooking them on a bent thorn
and a line of twisted pampas grass; hurrying down to the branch or the
creek or the bayou or whatever it may have been; sitting down on a
brand-new stump that the devil had put there to tempt him; throwing out
his line; sitting there in the sun dreaming and brooding....

And then a tug, a twitch, a flurry in the clear water of Eden, a pull, a
splash, and the First Fish lay on the grass at Adam's foot. Can you
imagine his sensations? How he yelled to Eve to come--look--see, and,
how annoyed he was because she called out she was busy....

Probably it was in that moment that all the bickerings and back-talk of
husbands and wives originated; when Adam called to Eve to come and look
at his First Fish while it was still silver and vivid in its living
colors; and Eve answered she was busy. In that moment were born the
men's clubs and the women's clubs and the pinochle parties and being
detained at the office and Kelly pool and all the other devices and
stratagems that keep men and women from taking their amusements
together.

Well, I didn't mean to go back to the Garden of Eden; I just wanted to
say that summer is here again, even though the almanac doesn't vouch for
it until the 21st. Those of you who are fond of smells, spread your
nostrils about breakfast time tomorrow morning and see if you detect it.

The Smell of Smells

Attention Bookworms: