Front Porch: Decades later, scent from childhood still brings joy

When I was a child living in the borough of Queens in New York City, I would often go on Saturdays with my father to the 5-acre family-owned piece of property (referred to as “the land”) out in rural New Jersey, where he would do some maintenance or mowing or puttering.

The original plan was that eventually a house would be built and we’d live there. It didn’t quite work out that way, and we headed instead to Miami, Florida, but that’s another story.

My mother worked on Saturdays, so it was usually just my father and me. A number of my parents’ friends lived in the area, one of whom we frequently stopped by to see for a 20-minute hello on the way to the land.

I always liked that short visit. A dog named Brownie lived there, and he would play with me while the adults did that boring thing, standing around and talking. I’d always know when we were arriving because there were wonderful scents that filled my nose as we turned off the road and drove down their long driveway.

I never have been able to describe the smell because there’s not something I can particularly isolate about it. But there, across the George Washington Bridge from Manhattan, New York, through rural northern New Jersey, not far from the Wanaque Reservoir, I smelled … meadow.

It was such a distinct smell, especially for a city kid like me, that I recognize now whenever I smell it and can conjure it up whenever I need to. I’ve needed to quite a bit recently.

It’s true that 2024 has been a rough year for us, exacerbated, I’m afraid, by the onward march of the years. We’ve had deaths within our family, including our nephew, who we were able to visit in hospice care in Wenatchee until he died. Deaths of more distant relatives and closer-by friends, including the unexpected death of my friend Pam Senske, whose remembrance of life celebration is taking place as I write these words. I would be there except for the fact that I’m down with the flu and also taking care of my husband, who has just caught it from me and is having a couple of tough days (these things hit him especially hard since he had COVID a few years ago).

We’ve heard medical diagnoses for people we know, some of which have the unfortunate adjectives of inoperable or terminal or debilitating in front of them. Plus our own health issues, and more.

It’s getting to be a lot. And to avoid spiraling into a low-level depressive state, when I go to bed at night or sneak in a little nap during the day or just let my mind wander, I try to make my brain recall experiences that make me happy – current or past – thoughts and memories that are good, about things and people that I love. Recently, I find myself going to the smell of meadow.

At the land, my father was busy doing things. I was an obedient child and did as I was told (this comes as a surprise to my friends), so when he told me not to wander off the land, that’s the way it was. He and I shared the sandwiches we’d brought with us for lunch, sitting on one of those famous New England stone walls that bisected the property, but most of the rest of the time, I was on my own (once I was old enough, which today would probably be judged way too young).

There was a tiny brook toward the back, never much deeper than my ankle and sometimes dried up, and I spent countless hours looking at things in it and poking at stuff. I loved to skip, jump over rocks and run after low-flying insects or an occasional butterfly. I crawled on hands and knees through the tall wild grasses that covered everything and searched for bugs or interesting pebbles and sniffed different plants and flowers. I’d flop over backward and look up at the sky, trying to find clouds that resembled marshmallows or whatever shape I could compare them to. Or fall asleep there.

All the while I was inhaling the smell of meadow. It just made me feel so good, though I had no idea how it would move from my nostrils deep into my brain, and how it could bring forth the memories of those simple and joyful experiences associated with it.

Or how helpful that is for me today.

“Little things seem nothing, but they give peace, like those meadow flowers which individually seem odorless but all together perfume the air.” – French author George Bernanos