The Lasting Imprint of My Childhood Home

The rich scent of manure wafts through the air mingled with the earthy smell of churned soil after rain. This is my first memory of home - a sensory explosion that, even now, doesn’t bother me. Instead it transports me back to homemade soups, and fields of strawberries, and the sound of clicking metal knitting needles and the cozy warmth of a hand-made afghan blanket.

My boys and I chug along traveling east in an open air train car and they wrinkle their noses in disgust at the strange smell of poop as they call it. This will never be home to them, I think to myself slightly annoyed. We pass dozens of farms, each one a replica of the other. I point out the tiny farmer behind the plough working the land with only horse and donkey leading the way. They ask why there’s clothing hung on a line in the yard and a memory of my own mother hanging white sheets on a line tangles with these new memories. Large silos rise up to the sky and a squat farmhouse rests nearby. Barefoot children with bonnets sell lemonade and hand picked flower bouquets at a roadside stand. 

I take it all in - the smell, the sounds, the invisible sweat of a day’s labor and I feel the immense nostalgia for being home.

'We leave something of ourselves behind when we leave a place,' the writer Pascal Mercier once said. And indeed, a part of me will always reside in this land preserved in a bygone era.