The Smells of the Farm

It is some unearthly hour of the morning.  In spite of the stifling heat, I have somehow managed to sleep for a few hours.  Now something is pulling me back into the realm of consciousness.  Why am I waking up?  The dogs are barking, but that's nothing new.  Something is wrong.  Something is horribly, unspeakably wrong and it is pulling me out of blissful slumber.

I am suffocating, gagging on...on...something.  A few moments of struggle bring me to full consciousness and I soon realize that the something that has wakened me and is stealing my breath is a smell.  It is an odour I have never smelled before (so my sleep- and oxygen-deprived brain tells me).  Certain that I and my parents are in mortal danger of the house blowing up at any moment (even though I have already determined that the odour is neither natural gas nor sewer gas), I stumble down the stairs to my parents room.  The smell is even worse on the main level of the house.

"Dad.  Dad.  DAD!"  Oh no, it's too late.  They've already succumbed.  Before bolting out of the house to save myself, I try one more time.  "DAD!!"

A snort and groan assure me that my parents are, at the very least, still alive.  "Whaaat?"

"Dad there's a weird smell and I don't know what it is and you need to check the basement because I don't know what I'm looking for."  At 24 years old, I ought to know this sort of thing by now, but I don't.  My parents, still trying to wake up, have no idea what I'm going on about.  It takes a little more explaining, but my dad finally gets out of bed.  As he reluctantly follows me out of the room, my mom makes the most absurd pronouncement I have ever heard: "I think it's skunk."  It can't possibly be skunk.  I've smelled skunk before.  It's a common enough smell around the farm.

After what seems like an eternity of standing in that awful stench, my dad - who I'm sure has gone down to the basement just to please me, and not because he's actually taking our imminent deaths seriously - returns to the main floor to inform me that the basement smells absolutely fine and he thinks Mom is right.  Clearly the stench is getting to his brain.  I watch skeptically as he sticks his head out the front door.  Within a couple of seconds he is reeling back inside from the powerful odour.  it is even stronger outside and, yes, it is skunk.

Slightly bewildered, I help my dad close all the windows in the house (to keep out the stench that's already in) and return to bed, gagging until I finally fall into a fitful slumber.

Every farm kid knows what skunk smells like, but when your house has been doused in it, it's barely recognizable. There are innumerable smells that farm kids can identify in an instant, and some that take us a bit longer to place.

I've already mentioned natural gas and sewer gas.  Those are both dangerous.  We don't encounter those very often.  It's the gross smells that are more common:

• skunk 
• manure (not so bad in the field, but pretty nasty if it's concentrated in a barn)
• dead stuff (mice in the walls, cattle in the deadstock pile, random critters in the bush) 
• gasoline and diesel (some people like those smells - I don't) 
• moldy feed 
• rotten stuff in the garden
• and a few other odours I can't think of just now.

Lest my readers think it's all bad, let me list a few of the more pleasant smells from the farm:

• sweat (not gross teenage boy sweat, obviously; the smell of clean sweat reminds me of my dad)
• fresh cut hay (it's like mowed grass, but more so)
• the barn (the one with clean straw and kittens in it, not the type of barn where a lot of cows hang out all together)
• good quality silage (my sister hates the smell of all silage, but if it's not rotting, I quite like it)
• the clean air smell after it rains (I know that happens in the city, too, but it's even nicer on the farm)
• lilacs in the front yard

There are probably some scents I haven't listed because I don't know they exist.  For some reason, there are certain things I just can't smell.  I've been told tansy has a strong smell.  No matter how much I shove my nose in a tansy plant, I smell nothing.  But for those of you who don't live on a farm, this is an idea of what the farm smells like.  For those of you who have been on the farm, what is your favourite (or least favourite) smell?