Riding through the farm lands last weekend on the motorcycle gave me a chance to relax and enjoy the sights, sounds, and smells. Because of my allergies and sinuses I don’t always smell flowers, foods, or everyday things that most people take for granted.
It was the mowing season and I could smell the fresh cut hay lying in the fields waiting to be bailed or rolled. It reminded me of all those summer days playing in the barn at my aunt’s farm with my cousins in Missouri. We played hide and seek behind the stacked hay bales in the barn loft or climbed down the ladder to hide in the empty stalls.
In the afternoon my cousins and I would walk out into the fields and woods to find the cows grazing and begin herding them down the paths leading to the barns. When the cows came into the barn with their bodies warm from the summer sun and their udders full and ready to be milked, their scent mixed with the odors of freshly cut hay and filled the barn with a perfume that can’t be bottled.
We spent hours exploring the root cellar filled with canned fruits and vegetables for the winter and the evenings catching fireflies. These are memories that I wouldn’t trade for anything.
My aunt’s house sat at the end of a country road with the corn cribs on one side of the road and my aunt’s home which was a 1960’s modern electric marvel sitting on the opposite side of the road. Across the highway were the fields I remember my uncle tending and mowing in the summer.
My cousin Carl went on to raise polled Herford breeding stock, and Rita and Johnny still live just down the road from where they grew up in Ozark, Mo.
My aunt Elma has Alzheimer’s and although she wouldn’t remember who I was today, I will always remember the childhood memories of farm life that I continued to enjoy even after my family moved to Oklahoma and onto California.
It is amazing what the smells one picks up while riding on a Harley can trigger in your mind; the memories and the smiles it can bring when you look back.
No comments:
Post a Comment