33- "GOOD SMELLS"...MEMORIES II....

Whiffs and sniffs!
"Grandma...how do you always know when your cake and cookies and bread are ready to come out of the oven?" Spending a week or so on the old Cline farm in Rockingham County in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia was pure adventure for me as a kid. My grandma had one of those old-fashioned wood stoves that required a high skill of scientific smarts straight from simply experience and not book learning. "The smell...I can smell when a cake is done."
Yeast rolls...preparing them, kneading the dough, the rising of the bread and the baking are still locked into my memory bank. Gosh, what I wouldn't give for some of her cookies or rolls hot from that wood oven...hmmmm. An approaching summer thunderstorm and after the storm smells. Cabbage boiling away and homemade spaghetti sauce simmering, too.
Ancient barns have smells that are disappearing all too fast, because the old barns are disapperaring all too fast. I have explored and photographed hundreds of the old barns throughout my native Virginia.
My grandmother's cellar...down on the farm. For years she stored canned everything down in the cellar on shelves with sagging boards. I always volunteered first to go outside, no inside steps, to the cellar door to 'fetch' a jar of peached...tomatoes...green beans and even canned side meat. BUT, never in the evening. Was too gosh darn scary down there, and I never knew what could be lurking around a corner.
Mothballs...older country folk seemed to like those mothballs.
My grandfather Steffey's (Carl) Rum River Cured-Crook cigars. He would puff them down near the end as he rocked in his fave rocking chair next to Willie in the dining room.
Building a new wood frame house! That old custom is slowly going out of vogue, with those wood smells. Fresh mint growing in a spring...even better yet, pulling some of that fresh mint to use in a pitcher of freshly brewed tea, iced a bit.
BROWNIES, yeah! Horses in a stable. A new book, never opened before.
Suntan lotion with that little girl and her dog on the front! An energetic kitten. A sparkling, clean kitchen like my grandmother's (Willie). Digging in a flower garden's good earth.
Pizza baking in an old brick oven...ever tried 'white' pizza?
Freshly washed clothing that has been hanging on an outside clotheline....
My fave? Think it has to be that mint growing in a spring across my great-grandfather John Marshall Steffy's homesite on Buttermilk Spring Road in the Valley.
And your faves?