When I was a kid my dad used the expression, country air to describe a smell that is relatively typical in rural regions such as our own each spring when farmers top-dress crop and hay fields with manure.
My dad didnt grow up in the country and the homesteading bug didnt bite him until much later in life; when it was too late to buy goats and live off the land what with the fact he had a real job that warranted the wearing of a monkey suit, five days a week according to him.
He envied the lives of the people with the small family farms that dotted the countryside he drove to get to and from his office in Carroll County. His job would also take him south to West Virginia and North Carolina where similar farms would help him imagine a simpler life that didnt require being behind the wheel of a company-issued Chrysler in a suit and tie with his open briefcase and the half eaten remains of drive-thru sandwich on the passenger seat beside him.
And even though he didnt realize this lifestyle, he spent plenty of time reading and learning and laughing when he and my mom discovered it took an enormous amount of tomatoes to make sauce or ketchup; more than they could ever grow in their own backyard garden.
What a gift to be given, a love of food grown in your own backyard, prepared with love and laughter in what was always the heart of my childhood home, the kitchen, and eaten around the table rich with conversation and the encouragement to try new things.
Im not certain my parents even knew how much that would come to mean to me and my brothers later in life when it was happening in real time.
My dads left arm, the arm he wore his watch, was always tanner than his right arm because it was the arm he had in the open window as he traversed the roads of Ohio and beyond when he was a salesman.
He loved to show us how tan his arm was by taking off his watch and showing us the part of his wrist that never saw the sun.
We loved to hear the stories he had to tell about his customers in Washington, D.C., and Chapel Hill. We loved to hear about the restaurants he frequented and the times he heard live jazz in a club I couldnt possibly remember the name of, but I know there was a time when we had a dozen or so matchbooks from the place.
I imagined my dad having all these adventures without us, but I have come to realize it must have been a very lonely life on the road met with occasional smiles from a few strangers, several speeding tickets from troopers hiding in plain sight behind the billboard and nothing but static on the radio when he was in the mountains of Appalachia.
Coming back to a home on the edge of town to a garden with too many weeds across the street from a field leased to a farmer, we had our own little piece of land that every spring and sometimes in the fall would smell like country air.
