Barn smells

   From the ages of about eleven to fifteen, I went to a kind of hippie summer camp in upstate New York, parts of which were a small, working farm. One year, I was assigned to stay with a group of boys in a converted chicken coop.
   During those summers, some of us would play floor hockey in the storage floor of a nearby barn. I loved the smell of the hay there, and although those years were not the happiest for me, there was still something about the aromas there that I have sweet memories of. The smell of the weeds burned to keep away the insects during outdoor evening events, the biodegradable soap we used at the bathing stream, and that hay.
   I  am surprised when I reminded of it that people don't talk more about smelling in a positive sense. I cannot offhand think of another example of a thing that can so powerfully illicit memories seemingly dormant for so long. When people talk of smelling something, it usually is of something they find unpleasant.
   Perhaps most interesting is how the olfactory seems to bring forth past experiences in an almost non-linguistic way. And although I am someone who finds language to possess so much potential beauty, I also can see it as being too dominant and reaching. My nose can often have a better sense of things.