Makes Sense To Me

Makes Sense To Me

In her book, Word Painting, Rebecca McClanahan discusses the importance of exploiting our senses in our writing. Description of odor, she noted, is especially difficult. This is a challenge for me in the best of circumstances; my smeller began to fail in 1962 when I sniffed an open, unlabeled container and discovered ammonia’s dark potential.

Use of one’s senses is not always about ability. Sometimes memories go dormant, waiting for the right trigger to waken them. I may have been forty years old when I entered a restaurant foyer heated by a kerosene stove. Wham! That combusting kerosene odor hit my brain, tears flooded my eyes, and my throat knotted like I’d swallowed a stone.

When I was young, my nose was crackerjack, and I still possess old olfactory memories. Put my nose anywhere near a kerosene heater, and I fly back in time faster than Doctor Who. Zap! I’m in my four-year-old body in a chicken coop, planted on a bed of fresh sawdust among the warmth of a hundred, yellow-feathered, baby chicks. They were maybe five-days-old, fresh from their postal delivery. I remember how pungently the scent of decades of henhouse life permeated the building’s unfinished wooden walls. Ah, the pleasure. I need only close my eyes to hear those chicks chirping and pecking in that warm bubble of time. “Cheep, cheep, cheep.”

Another memory came from our horses and their harnesses. The scent of horses was sweet and unique, perhaps a by-product of what they ate: grain, corn, and hay. During my initial year in school—first grade—my father still kept a team of workhorses on the farm. Like me, I suspect he loved their smell and simply enjoyed having them near; horses had been part of his daily life for more than fifty years.

The harnesses hung behind the animals’ stalls on large wooden wall-pegs, and Dad regularly checked the gear for wear and deterioration. Under the stress of pulling heavy loads, sudden breakage could injure horse and man, and no dairy farmer of that era could afford lost workdays.

Maintenance was critical for leather items, and we took our harnesses to be oiled and repaired at Bill Dehn’s Harness & Shoe Shop in town. Once past the front door, with its ting-a-ling bell that announced any customer’s entry, the shop attacked my senses like an alien entity. There stood Mr. William Dehn. He cast an unforgettable image to a seven-year-old,. He was taller and more angular than my father, with a gray wedge of hair that projected upward from the side of his head like a promotional billboard, and when he spoke, his saw-blade voice left a haze of phrases in its wake. The crispness of his words allowed them to cling to the air even after his sentences ended, allowing us to consider what he said two or three times before individual syllables died and fell to the floor.

The shop’s business counter lay along the right wall just inside the entry. At my eye-level, the counter cast itself long and wide, a stark surface on which helpless pieces of tack sometimes sprawled as Mr. Dehn stitched and healed their wounds. On the wall opposite, a crisscross of sturdy display shelves extended to the ceiling. I thought them a craggy scape of hand and foot holes begging to be climbed. But knowing better, I restrained myself.

Toward the back of the shop—suspended from hooks on the walls and ceiling—hung harnesses, bridles, and other tack items, which Mr. Dehn adroitly avoided by ducking or using his hands to shield his head and protect his billboard haircut. In the midst of this jungle of leather sat the main source of the shop’s overwhelming scent, a large galvanized tank filled with neatsfoot oil. Murky and unknown, the dark liquid instilled fear. A pulley with a metal crossbar and chains hung over the tank. It was in this tank that our harnesses would be soaked until the leather reclaimed its resilience and strength. I was happy I didn’t need to be oiled.

Baby chicks, horses, and Bill Dehn’s shop. I recall those smells and more. Rebecca McClanahan may be correct. Perhaps I can’t describe the odors, but I can detail my responses as if I entered the shop yesterday.

The End