The Smells of Home

Funny how things bring you back to another time in your life.

I was at an air show yesterday, and as I caught a whiff of airplane fuel from a vintage warbird starting up, I was almost immediately back in my dad's old 1956 Chevrolet truck. Not sure why. But, the smell was definitely familiar and all at once, my skinny nine-year-old legs were dangling off the ripped upholstery, riding down the old dirt road near our house in the Hammock, while the fresh summer air blasted in through the vent window. Dad was there beside me, Kent cigarette in one hand and the old, worn steering wheel in the other. He had on his typical work clothes, khaki-colored Dickies and clumpy cement-dotted work shoes, and he was casually just taking all the bumps along the road in stride. His truck, faded and dirty as always, smelled exactly like that airplane fuel. A mixture of dirt and heat, metal and leaking gasoline. A smell that is so engrained in my psyche that I could recognize it anywhere.

I went a lot of places in that old truck. We went to Cedar Key a lot, fishing, and the trip was a long one for this girl, and I always fell asleep leaning up against the door, with the wind blowing in my face. We'd go up to the local hardware store in Ocala, when it still had a fountain in the middle of town and board sidewalks down Broadway. He'd pick up lay mash for the chickens, a few boxes of nails and, if I asked him just right, a bag of boiled peanuts from the old blind colored man who ran the fish store at the end of the sidewalk. Yep, I said colored. That's how we referred to people of color...colored. It wasn't a derogatory term then.

He always kept a horsehoe magnet bigger than my foot in the truck. I was fascinated with it and played with it when he went over to the gas station to get his gas can for the lawnmower filled up. Once I played a little too much and pulled up part of the old metal floorboard. Rather than fix it, he just left it be, so that I could sit up on the seat and watch the road underneath go by. Most times, he covered it with an old cookie sheet.

That smell, which to some might be offensive, is something that makes me remember good times back in old Florida, when things were just swimming in the river and running through the woods with my dog, Sandy. That smell makes me remember my Dad and his stocky hands, wrinkled and brown from the sun, holding that steering wheel of old "Petunia," driving down the road at 40 miles an hour, her top speed, while pine straw and bits of grass and leaves blew around in the bed of the truck.

Good memories, and ones that I wish I could recall more often.