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Who hasn’t loved all the scents specific to a village?

This is a little-discussed peculiarity that is universal, regardless of cultural background.

There are different smells depending on the season, although the major ones are from fires, farm animals, machinery and activities required for growing and processing fruits and vegetables. There are also many that are seasonal.

A starting point is to classify all the different scents that are present in a village:

– wonderfully sweet, savory, smoky, earthy and more, almost an endless list

– neutral, otherwise easily missed or unrecognized scents, often only remembered because they are tied to a specific positive memory or experience

– downright unbearable for anybody who hasn’t spent time and created memories and connections in a village at a young age

The first two are a common occurrence, although the third one is fairly rare to hear about.

How would it happen that something as bad-smelling as farm animal manure somewhere in a village end up being connected to something positive, in many cases overcoming the normal negative perception of that specific scent? It’s a question I’ve thought about for a long time, and for which I couldn’t explain to myself clearly.

For that, it would be best to detail some of my personal experience;

Up until I was in my mid-teens, me and my family went every few years to visit relatives in Bulgaria, with the majority of the time there being spent in the family village house.

For the month or two that I was there, little time was spent in a modern city, so all the interactions and activities were inclusive of all the sights, sounds and smells of a village.

Those years, in the late 1990’s, there were still a fair amount of people living in villages, with the draw to bigger cities not being as strong, due to some factories and industries still struggling along in small cities and towns. This meant that the working of land and caring for farm animals along with the self-sustenance practices such as growing, preparing and often cooking fruits and vegetables was present everywhere in those regions.

The more people there were living that sort of life, the higher the frequency of scents both familiar and unfamiliar to me would make an appearance.

This is the specific point where it started to become apparent to me that the connection happened between something positive and something negative.

Those days spent during the summer vacation were primarily care-free days; there wasn’t anything that would cause stress or negative emotions or memories. This ranged from playing sports, exploring the countryside and village square, to seeing all that was on offer at festivals and outdoor markets, along with family gatherings. It was exactly these moments, repeated so often, with certain scents nearly ever-present, that created a change in the association between emotions and certain scents. It’s a scenario that commonly appears as associating the smell of a food item like baked pie with a specific person in your life.

That is normal, every single person has this association; Although I’ve yet to meet many other people who have had a similar experience like I have. To most people, it’s a foreign concept to have something positive associated with something negative.

The same could be applied to other things in life as well; the association between certain items can be redirected in odd ways that the majority of people won’t understand or experience. Even so, it’s not something that happens to everyone. I am certain, however, that this peculiar occurrence is far more common than we often realize, due to this fact that it’s something that’s not limited to just one specific point.

There is one factor that may have played a major role in this association; With having lived my whole life in Canada, my experience was likely different from someone my age who has spent the majority of their youth in a village or town in the Balkans. For them, there is a higher chance that negative emotions are connected with village life, whether that be due to personal experience or outside influences like societal expectations or realities of life in that country.

Maybe for them, it’s the exact opposite; that they have a similar association tied to a moment or moments they spent in a city in the part of the world I live in…

It would be interesting to hear from all of you about your experiences of spending summer in a village…

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On the topic of memories; most small villages that I had seen when spending summers in Bulgaria had limited street lighting, which meant that after dark there was a guaranteed meeting spot where all the children would meet to play:

The only street other than the main street that had a street light.

That wasn’t always a guaranteed spot to find other children your own age to play with every night, although it was an exciting change of pace, an adventure every time just to get there and to see who would show up. Navigating your way through the dark with barely anybody or anything else on the streets, a five minute walk felt like an eternity, although far from boring.

Most often the activities decided upon would be a soccer match under the street light, or for all the kids to go see what was going on in the village square where the bar and coffee shop or restaurant were located. One of the best highlights of this was being able to see all the stars in the night sky, with the endless sound of crickets and grasshoppers everywhere you went.

Another of those things hard to replicate and impossible to find when living in a city.