Progymnasmata

This anecdote was told to me by a friend at dinner today.

So when my friend was a little girl in the late 1960s, she lived on an Army base in Southern Utah (USA). During the warm summers there, the hedgerows that lined the streets of the base (particularly the housing area where the families of the soldiers lived) became gathering places for mosquitoes.

To alleviate these pests, the Army would load a tanker truck with DDT and douse the hedgerows every Sunday. "The DDT was white and opaque" she said. "It very much looked like the truck was spraying the hedges with real clouds."

So, being a kid, she would run or ride her bike on the sidewalk between the truck and the hedgerow. . . . in the DDT cloud. Up and down the streets of the base, playing as though they were "in the clouds." She did this every week during those summer months, for several years.

"I'm sure it has affected me" she said. "But, the strangest thing is that to this day the scent of chemical pesticide smells sweet and stirs warm, pleasant memories in me."

Silent Spring was published in 1962. Several years before my friend played in the clouds of DDT on Army base in southern Utah.

What did I like about this story? The idea of poison smelling "sweet" -- the image of children playing in clouds of death paired with the image of a grown adult looking back at that image in her life with a fondness seeped in the innocence of a child and brewed with the ignorance of adults.