The Air We Eat

Issue #7

May 29, 2023

Tall pine trees frame the Simsbury Public Library, deep green needles against the white brick. My mother reaches for my hand as we mount the steps. Her hand in mine is sure; our coordinated movements say: we belong together, and we belong in this place. I am eight years old, linked to the women in my family by the love of reading. Both my parents are readers. They are practical people. They teach me to be polite, pay attention, make an effort, and look things up. At home, looking things up means going to the encyclopedia.

But in this building of books, I am set free. Here, the few rules belong to the librarian. The smell of books merges with the aroma of old wood from the bookshelves. There are complex aspects of this aroma. The labor of men: logging, hauling, milling, loading, and distribution. Millions of pages for the printers. The New England forests give way: pine, cherry, maple, oak, and poplar. The board feet are built into the library stacks, floors, walls, and the librarian’s front desk.

Smell is said to be our oldest sense. It is the only sense that connects directly to the brain. One inhalation can deliver an aroma that conjures up a distinct memory from decades ago. In one of mine, I run up the back stairs to see my great-grandmother. Nanny wraps me in an embrace. She smells like my grandparents’ house: books, old wood, and flowers. There is a greenhouse next door. Nanny has her own smell. A clean smell, starch from the pleats of her plaid shirt dress. We are a reading team. Between sentences, I wonder when her false teeth will clack next. Somehow I know this is a moment when life is easy and quiet as I listen to my great-grandmother read a wilderness story. The bulldozer is a clue I am to remember for the rest of my life.

All these years later, I remember her voice and her cadence. Especially when she read the part about the bulldozer pummelling the last bit of rabbit dens. I could smell the putrid exhaust. I could see gray plumes of smoke from the efforting machine. Such horrible sounds of trees falling, like bombs dropping. Nanny did not annotate. My great-grandmother was asking me to remember. She was suggesting where my moral compass should be placed. She paid attention to the world and to me.

Our brain deciphers smell delivered by our breath. I prune the trees on this Appalachian land where I now live. The work is careful. I am not practiced, I am easily distracted by the scent of the cut branches. So clean, so full of vitality.

The breeze picks up. The wind has been strong on the ridge recently. Exceptionally so. The old-growth trees appear stable. The younger leggier ones bend in such wild winds.

During the first week of May, the rains arrive. The Rhododendrons begin to bud. Their Azalea cousins burst into full bloom in a zig-zag pattern. Previously so beautifully proportioned, the bushes appear to have forgotten where their colors go. The chaos of pink and white flowers reveals my amateur pruning efforts. But off on the edges, the Flame Azaleas were spared—brilliant orange flowers are ever so pungent. Their floral smell travels on the breeze.

In the third week of May, the southern mountains disappear behind the grand leafing of cedars and oaks. These mountains are over a billion years old. The air is warm with the scent of pine resin, released from the oil in their needles. The dogs are upset. Young bears are climbing the tallest, oldest pine tree in the distance.

There is bear scat here and there along my lane. Bears can smell food miles away. They can cover eighteen miles in a straight line to get to an anticipated food source. In my county, bears know that Wednesday is garbage day. They wander, watching for the unattended garbage cart. I skip my morning run. It’s not worth getting between a mama bear and her offspring, with my dogs. This is their land. Bears have walked these trails for thousands of years. Humans are the young species. My great-grandmother told me so years ago by sitting me on her lap and reading a book about the wilderness.

As we close for now, I want to note this as a transition issue. It’s a return to the essence of Matters of Kinship, which is reciprocity in and between ecosystems. Every moment of exploring the crisis that is Great Salt Lake which mirrors the global crisis felt important. Yet I realize that is not where my voice belongs now. I live in one of the most biodiverse regions of the world. To tell this story, I can go outside, I can call on local scientists and storytellers, farmers and professors, activists, and lived experience. So marks the beginning of a more intense look at relationships in and between the ecosystems of Western North Carolina.

It is my dearest wish that you will continue this exploration with me.

My best, Kath

Sources: Breath by James Nestor

A Natural History of the Senses by Diane Ackerman

Smell by Matthew Cobb

Softening Time by Elena Brower

Erosions by Terry Tempest Williams