My big project before the next leg of our Road Show was to replace tile in our guest bathroom.
The scent of damp wood and plaster behind my tile was a bit gross, yet somehow pleasant. It made me think of the resourcefulness and hand hewn care that went into our row home.
Going into the walls of a 110 year old Pennsylvania house is a history lesson and an olfactory delicacy.
Did you know that the old-time plasterers used horse hair to keep the schmutz together as they smooshed it between the wood laths?
Do You Smell That?
Last week, a stranger emailed me to say he was handed my book, Good Posture, and finally began to read it.
He had one of those I Thought I Was The Only One Who… moments C. S. Lewis uses to describe the beginning of a true friendship.1
This person’s “moment” happened as he read about the power of smells in defining a household.
In my chapter called In The Flesh, I share deep-seated memories from various friends’ homes:
Oil paints and fresh-baked bread at my friend Tom’s ultra-mod home (small town eccentrics who opened my heart and mind to the arts)
Potpourri, chocolate cake, and the sparks of model trains at Tony’s place (welcoming, fun-loving family, with a flair for the ornery)
Garlic, photo equipment, and espresso at the Taylors’ bungalow (fashion photographers at seminary who came of age in the late 1960’s)
Of course, I meant smell as a metaphor for household culture, but the more I think about it, aromas are more than mere analogies.
Aromas speak to the very nature of things.2
Have you ever smelled a 100% wool sweater as it’s laid out to dry? The lamby smell puts you in direct contact with its donor.
Smells Better Than Teen Spirit?
Without the smell of good food and coffee, The Row House Forums would be impoverished. Our sort of attention to atmosphere has everything to do with commending good news to our culture.
Ideas need sweaters.
If the smells of this dispatch are luring you in like the arresting aroma of hard wood fires wafting up from Bruster’s BBQ along the Ephrata rail trail where it’s simply impossible NOT to stop in and wolf down some grub, then pick up my book to read more!
I have a box of 20 at my house, and I’ll be glad to send you one for ten bucks. Or you can order one from Square Halo Books. I’d love your thoughts on it.
Better yet, send me your own smell stories!
To close, here’s a dedication from my book that I wrote to The Row House (the physical place, not just the emblem for my work) in 2017:
A Tribute To 413 College Ave
Thanks, dear inanimate object, for enclosing a home. For never moving through the throes of mouth braces, disappointed dreams, and job changes. For showing off the deep earth in your red clay bricks, Victorian husbandry in your horsehair plaster, and the American Dream in your 2000 square feet of family air. Kudos to the workaday architect who laid out College Avenue sometime around 1907 and who probably had a tough time sleeping with the repetitive streetscape in his mind: Two houses conjoined, up a foot, and two more separated by thin, arched alleys. Claustrophobic, dense, mundane? Never. Not with windows placed at front, rear and side; really, anywhere the designer could cram them. Our next door neighbors can talk to us by “visual” phone through our bay windows. Nice touch, sir. Hurrah to human scale. Approaching you is like the embrace of an old friend or a new one you want to linger with for one more cup of tea. Verticality in door and windows bespeaks a father or mother, someone to look up to, to trust, to be caught up in. And up you go through narrowing staircases of carefully-lathed balustrades. To top it off, many nights were spent with teenagers on your flat roof watching fireworks, entranced by the city laid out before us within a canopy of old trees. It’s country up there, the streets muffled and harmless. Here’s to the families who lived here before us. Of note, Mr. & Mrs. Groff who seemed to be here from 1937 to whenever Mrs. Groff was widowed in the 1980s (the city directories and deed books are tough to decipher). Here’s to the family who converted the middle second-floor bedroom into a bath after the Groffs, a welcome luxury for my family with five women. Here’s to the family just before us who installed a modern kitchen with elevated counters to match Mrs. Brown’s stature (not that we notice much of a difference except when my belt loops catch on the drawer knobs). When we first looked at the house, a crayon greeting made by three-year-old Alex Brown said, “Get better, Daddy,” or a similar sentiment. The wish was a leftover. His dad had already died of cancer, and that’s how we got you. A family torn and moving on. We moved in and knew we had our work cut out for us. That work continues now that the roofs are strong, your Living Room is the way we like it, and most of the rooms are about as good as they’re going to get on our budget. After five years, I finally finished reconstructing, scraping and painting my favorite room of all: Your front porch. Here’s to a Heavenly Father who dwells in heaven, makes his home among us in Jesus, and continues to take notice of His children’s needs for shelter. We share this house because we know it’s not our own.
Lewis, C.S. The Four Loves (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1960).