It is not blood that runs through my veins, but the splash of a quick summer rain on a too hot day when it pelts down quenching the thirst of my parched back yard leaving it's sweet smell along the way.
The very cells in my skin. They tell me I should only enjoy the salty air of a nearby ocean, a mere day's drive away. But in fact, they are packed with the Indiana clay that will never go away. Not from my skin, not from under my fingernails. They are permanently part of who I am, what I believe and ultimately what I would not want to spend one single moment forgetting.
I cannot deny I love fresh caught seafood, but that cannot compare to the smell of my hands after man-handling a tomato plant in early July to taste the uncomparable goodness of a red ripe fresh picked Indiana tomato while it's still warm from the summer sun. Or the dry smell when driving past a field of corn growing in a farmer's field.
To walk out your backdoor and slice your arms just a bit on the corn stalks that some people only recognize from Field of Dreams and grab a half dozen ears of the Ambrosia sweet corn before a refrigerator has began to spoil the best of your supper for the night.
To bask in the glory of a morel mushroom in those first fine days of May, where we listen to the roar of the race cars at 200 mph while frying those smells throughout the wide open house.
Knowing all this goodness will be quashed under some gloomy dark sky that pervades this middle part of America during those thousands of days in that short month of February.
The place I despise in the winter is the very place that I love all of the days of the year. I wouldn't trade this boring, flat piece of nowhere for all of the cement and plastic and nothingness that I see on my TV from the glorious elitest who attempt to explain to me that I am not like them.
You're damned right. I am not.
So, I'll leave you with the best of the best. A bit of Pete Fountain, who knows in which state his greatest fan lives. This courtesy of one of my best friends, whose father gave Pete his entire unparallelled collection when Pete's was drowned under Katrina.
And I long for my Indiana home.
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6 comments:
Pete Fontaine, Al Hurt, man you're lookin' way back to talent!
The first year we were in Florida, I couldn't get that song out of my mind. LAWD I loved Indiana.
I thought this might tug on your heartstrings a little. But I'll have to remind myself how much I love it here when those nasty winter winds start blowing.
Strange how we stay connected to where we are from, isn't it? I lived elsewhere for almost seven years yet it was never home. Home began the minute I crossed the Mackinac Bridge headed north...
cjh
There's no place like home.
No matter where "home" is.
The faint hint of an odor that's familiar will flood my mind with a torrent of memories of home.
Home is who we are and where we may finally rest.
Amen to all of that. I wonder sometimes about those who grow up living in all parts of the world. Do they have that innate sense of "home"? I'm not sure they can understand that concept anymore than I can understand theirs.
And Jess. I've read that the sense of smell is the strongest sense of recall for our memories. For about 15 years after my dad had died, if, on a rainy day, I opened up the grandfather clock he built, I could still smell the cigarettes he loved. Although I hate the smell of smoke I would always open it up and smell the "aroma" of my dad and remember him. About 5 years ago, the smell finally "gave up the ghost" of the cigarette smell on rainy days. And I miss him all over again knowing that I don't even have that anymore.
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