Tuesday, December 04, 2007

Your Home Smells Like Shit

I had dinner with my friend Bill tonight. He has arms that hang low, and his body is built like a thick steak. He once was an extra on a set for a Danny Devito film, and all he was asked to do -- since he's so muscular -- was pick up Devito and throw him across the room so the camera could film him flying through the air. Bill says Devito said to him: "Don't break my neck, Lurch," refering to the butler in The Addam's Family.

He was telling me about how he can notice the smells of different atmospheres. He says that it's going to snow in Bloomington tonight. They said so on the forecast, and he can smell it in the lack of moisture in the air. He sometimes has to travel to do work out in the desert, and he says that the air out in the dryness smells differently too.

He also grew up behind a farm, where the air supposedly smelled differently depending on what was being farmed in the season. Apparently manure smells differently. "Cow manure smells sweet," he said. "And pig manure isn't as bad as chicken manure because chickens is just foul. The worst thing you'll ever smell," he said.

I told him that my mother's side of the family are a bunch country bumpkins, that they live on a farm in Vietnam that once belonged to my grandparents. I had only met my grandmother once before she passed away, and grandfather I had never met at all.

When I was five years old I had visited my grandmother and relatives, and there was this massive pig out in back that had nowhere to go because it had kind of outrown its pen. So all it did was feed and sleep and getting bigger. When I went to visit the farmer relatives about two years ago, the pig was gone and so was its pen -- replaced with an add-on to the house with a washing machine.

I told Bill that for farmers, it seems that they live for that smell of farmland. How that musty manure smell kinda becomes necessary for comfort. He told me once he was driving through some small town and he could detect the smell of cow manure and exclaim, "Wow, the smell reminds me of my childhood home."

She said: "Your childhood smelled like shit?"

I don't believe in an afterlife ore reincarnation. But if I had to decide, I'd like to believe I was a farmer in a former life, tilling soil that would one day belong to my grandparents.