smells

Of all of our senses, i think that the sense of smell is grossly underrated. To have an olfactory capability of a dog must be wonderful indeed.
This morning I was walking through fields, in an attempt to take some pictures of National Trust properties, and though hampered somewhat by low flying clouds zipping in from the south west, I did manage to make it to St Catherine's Oratory, or what remains of it. This place was built on a very high spot as a penance for being found in posession of wine belonging to the totally incorrupt church. Anyhow, that is not really relevant and if I were to go on I'd have to look up dates and i am frankly not that interested. What I wanted to talk about was the ability of smells too evoke strong memories, and the abundant cowpats that littered the fields, did just that. I was transported back to my childhood and to the enormous freedom that I had in my life between leaving the house and going back to it.

I was a country boy at heart and I guess that in many ways I still am. You can take the boy from the countryside......blah blah you know the rest.

In those days there were two things that one always carried in ones pocket. We had no money, but everyone that I knew had a knife, and some string! How sad it is these days that carrying a knife has different connotations, and kids that carry them may be doing so for totally different reasons. I still carry one more or less wherever i go, but am aware that there are some places that it is best not to.

With a knife you could do so much, we were rarely bored. A Knife can be put to all sorts of good use, and we made all sorts of things. Bows and arrows were a staple, and a good bow became a prized posession. Alas most of them were not good and would break at the first use, and arrows would split or get lost as soon as used. Willows grew in abundance along the river banks and they provided most of the materials that we needed. String was essential of course for the bowstring but also for tying branches together to make camps. We could spend a whole day building a camp by the river bank only to find next day that someone else had wrecked it. It didn't matter, if we found another one that someone else had made, we'd wreck that and use the raw materials. We made spears too and pretended to hunt wild animals. WE never came close enough to any self respecting beast, but we liked to imagine that we might.

Later we'd make fishing rods, Tom Sawyer style, tying a length of string or line to the end, and with worms or bits of bread, we'd catch minnows and other more stupid fish all day long.

I can still smell the willow bark as it was stripped away, revealing the cold damp creamy white heartwood, I can smell the river and the nettlebeds that we seemed impervious to, though no doubt we were stung so often that we didn't notice, and i can smell the cowpats that we'd occasionally drop someone in.

It is an amazing sense, and it also works in reverse. If i think hard and focus on an event in my life, quite often it is a smell that comes to me before anything else. I wonder when this sense fades away like the others tend to, if memories of smells will still persist. I do hope so.