There are things I remember, and there are things I only think I remember. The present lies to me at times and replaces my memory with a remembered photograph or with someone else’s recollection of an event, a day, or a place as heard through their stories. But there is a way I can be sure of a memory. It is not sight, or sound, or taste or touch.
When I smell juniper, I am instantly transported to our front walk in Grandview, Missouri, where we lived when I was in kindergarten. I do not remember what the walk looked like. I think it was concrete, and I think it had a step or two of poured concrete between the sidewalk and the door. I don’t recall if we had a front porch. I think there might have been a patio. But I know – I know – that the sidewalk was lined with juniper bushes. It must have been, because all I need to do is crush a juniper berry between my finger and thumb and I am there.
When I smell fresh mint I am no longer in Missouri, but in Kansas, by the back door of my grandparents’ farmhouse. Mint grew around the doorway leading to the back, screened-in porch. Occasionally the swinging door would clip the tops of the mint sprigs, releasing the pungent aroma. I, too, would occasionally pinch off a leaf or two, put them on my tongue, and savor the cool, sharp bite. One sniff of crushed, fresh mint, and I am there.
There is another smell I don’t know how to describe other than to say it is the smell of an old wooden church, for that is where I smell it most often today. However, for me, it is the smell of my grandparents’ basement on Hickory Drive in Marietta, Georgia. I know the memory is real because I have no photographs of the basement to deceive me. I do know it was filled with treasures – antique furniture and civil war memorabilia. The picture in my mind is cloudy, but my memory and the imprint of the place is crisp and clear when I smell an old wooden church.
The smell of fresh cherries takes me to a market somewhere in Germany – Böblingen, I suppose. The smell, not the taste, but the smell of sweet tarts takes me to the candy truck on the road down the hill behind the officer’s club at Panzer Kaserne. It is the same with gummi Bears – well, not so much gummi Bears, but gummi Coke bottles. Dry hay – a smell I love, but one that doesn’t love me – takes me to the hayloft in the barn in Kansas. The smell of rich brown soil and I am behind the barn digging in the deep dark dirt for earthworms. The smell of fresh asphalt and I am in the back of a Chevy station wagon on newly paved I-70 in southern Indiana or Illinois in the early 1970’s. Diesel fumes? I am in the parking lot of an overlook at the South Rim of the Grand Canyon in September of 1990. Stale beer, the antiseptic smell of a hospital, Copenhagen (snuff, that is), and burning electronics take me to places I care not to go.
And when I crush underfoot fallen leaves of oak, maple, beech, and ash, and the sweet smell of a misty forest envelops me, I am taken to a place that is to me like heaven on earth. I can echo the words of the hymn-writer,
“When through the woods and forest glades I wander, and hear the birds sing sweetly in the trees; when I look down from lofty mountain grandeur and hear the brook, and feel the gentle breeze; Then sings my soul, my Savior God to thee; how great thou art, how great thou art!” - Stuart K. Hine
In his journals, John Muir raised his words of praise not just to the daily renewing of, but to the perpetual beauty of the earth, of sky and of sea, of dew and of rain, of light and of darkness:
“This grand show is eternal. It is always sunrise somewhere; the dew is never all dried at once; a shower is forever falling; vapor is ever rising. Eternal sunrise, eternal sunset, eternal dawn and gloaming, on sea and continents and islands, each in its turn, as the round earth rolls.” - John Muir
I share places such as these with you here, places I have been blessed to have experienced. I cannot directly share with you the smell of the forest, the aromas of fallen leaves and damp soil, the sounds of the brook and the birds, or the feeling of the cool mountain breeze and clinging pine mist. But perhaps these images will allow you to find your own way to a place where you can feel and hear and smell and sense the presence of, and remember a time when you were enveloped by the woods and forest glades, scorched by desert sun beating upon the bare rock, cooled by salt breezes, or embraced by the memories of the generations of those who experienced these things before you.
“There are always two people in every picture,” wrote Ansel Adams, “the photographer and the viewer.” But you then, take leave. Enjoy, but do not let my experience become yours. You do not need to search; it will find you if you just go, for “In every walk with Nature one receives far more than he seeks.” – John Muir
Ed Scheff - May 26, 2020