A Letter from Iowa: The Scent of Heaven
Read at the Deep River Congregational Church
By the Rev. Timothy Haut
November 23, 2008
Dear Timothy,
Life goes on in Blue Grass, and the year has circled around to another Thanksgiving. This morning I saw a pair of hawks circling the sky over our back yard, and it made me think that they were getting ready for their own Thanksgiving dinner. Life is full of circles, and it seems like the circle of each year keeps getting smaller. Tell me, Timothy, how did we get here again so quickly? Didn’t I just rinse the turkey gravy out of my mother’s old flow-blue gravy boat and put it back into the china cupboard with the little pilgrim salt and pepper shakers and the cut glass bowl that holds the cranberry relish? This circle of the seasons keeps getting smaller and smaller, swifter and swifter, probably because each new circle represents less and less of my life. When I was eight years old, a year represented an eighth of my life. No wonder it took so long to get from Halloween to Christmas. It seemed like an eternity! But now the year is just a snippet of a much longer lifetime, and I feel like I’ve been in an epic drama whose main plot outlines are now pretty clear and only the final pages lie ahead.
Yet there are still a few surprises left to be revealed, I imagine. That’s why I’m so eager to stick around a while longer. I want to see how a few things work themselves out. The recurring drama between Lenny Ditmar and Harold McCullough continues to be an interesting sub-plot of the great play, at least here in Blue Grass. Those two have always been like two bulls let loose in the same field. They’ve lived next door to each other for years and have always loved to disagree. Maybe you remember the feud that began when Lenny’s leaves were blowing onto Harold’s well-manicured lawn, and Harold got out his leaf-blower and blew them all back. Then Harold’s mulberry tree was dropping fruit onto Lenny’s driveway, and Lenny began flinging them at Harold’s garage door until it was splattered with purple polka dots.
A few years ago, it was decided to have a Thanksgiving parade down our Main Street here in town. The 4-H Club at the High School thought it would be fun to have a float, and they came up with the theme, “Turkey in the Straw.” They thought they'd keep it simple—a flatbed trailer covered with bales of hay where all the 4-H members could sit around and wave at the crowds along the street, while somebody dressed in a turkey costume strutted back and forth to the music of the old barn dance "Turkey in the Straw." Harold’s granddaughter Alicia begged him to be the turkey, so he reluctantly agreed to put on an oversized costume with big, yellow rubber feet and a three-foot long beak. Lenny offered to drive his old Farmall Tractor and pull the flatbed--and everything would have been fine if Lenny hadn’t been wearing his earphones to listen to the Packers’ football game on his transistor radio while he drove down the street. The ride got a little jerky for Harold, even going slow. His turkey strut kept landing him in the laps of the 4-H club members. And finally, when he stood up again to straighten out his tail feathers, Lenny suddenly shifted gears and the Thanksgiving turkey fell off the wagon. The kids were screaming at Lenny to stop the tractor, but the Packers were driving for a touchdown and were in the Lions’ red zone. As a result, Lenny was oblivious to the fact that Harold was already half a block behind them, running in his floppy yellow rubber turkey feet trying to catch up. That turkey was uttering words that should never be heard in a Thanksgiving parade.
Well, since that time they had managed to keep a somewhat fragile truce, largely due to the friendship of their wives, Wilma and Ruby. Both men managed to be on the Board of Deacons down at the Methodist church at the same time without incident; they served beans at the American Legion Ham supper and sat on stools fairly near to each other at the White Way Café for the men's coffee group each weekday morning. They learned to avoid such topics as politics and religion, where they never agree on anything as a matter of principle.
But when Lenny’s wife Wilma came down with cancer a few years ago, something thawed in the relationship of the two men. They still didn’t talk about politics and religion, but they started playing checkers in the afternoon. And during Wilma’s increasingly frequent hospital stays, it would be Harold who would drive Lenny back and forth, and sit with him in the waiting room, and bring him coffee (one milk, three sugars) when he couldn’t face anyone else in the men’s coffee club down at the White Way. At Wilma’s funeral. Harold sat next to his old rival in the family pew and reached around and patted him on the back as Rev. Metcalf told the gathered congregation about what a fine wife and friend Wilma had been.
It is a peculiar and wonderful thing that we are constantly being shaped and transformed into something that feels a lot like the grace of God. It happens in bits and snatches, sometimes in the subtle and unseen changes of the everyday fabric of our lives—just as the land of this good earth is shaped and changed over eons—by years of rain and wind, snow and melting ice. Sharp hills are softened, and the angular ravines of primal rivers are worn down into the fertile Iowa meadows where corn and watermelons grow. But sometimes the changes are forged out of the hammer blows of pain and crisis. I see both kinds of changes in the friendship of Lenny Ditmar and Harold McCullough.
This Thanksgiving Lenny will sit down with Harold and Ruby in their dining room in the small bungalow next door to us, and if I am very quiet while I stand in the kitchen washing dishes, I will be able to hear laughter drift across the yard, and later, near dark, I will see Lenny and Harold go stand out in back and watch the crows settle in the hickory trees up on the hill as the sun sets in the west. Maybe my Arnold will walk out and join them. They will say nothing. But in this fraternity of silence, they will share an understanding, a gratitude that in this lonely world, they are not alone. They will breathe deep of the November air and pull their jackets tighter around themselves, and give thanks for what they have lost and what they have gained. They will nod and shake hands and head inside for coffee.
This year will be even harder for Lenny than it is has been. He has kept a secret known only to a few. After Wilma died, he managed to go on with his life with some degree of normalcy. He learned to cook a little bit and do laundry, and his niece Lorraine comes over once a week or so to watch The Young and the Restless with him. He has staked out the same pew in church where he and Wilma always sat, and he walks his dog exactly at 6:30 each morning. He’s even joined a bowling league for over-60s. But nothing could fill the aching hole he had in his heart for Wilma, who had been his rock and best friend for 47 years. One thing made it a little better. Every night he would take her old nightgown out of the closet and roll it up on his pillow, so that as he went to sleep he could still smell the scent of Wilma next to him. I suspect that sometimes he even put on her nightgown, but I doubt that it became a regular habit. Most of these old Iowa farm boys wouldn’t be able to sleep thinking about the possibility of the fire department showing up in the middle of the night and finding him in women’s nightclothes. Still, it might have been a way to feel that Wilma was all around him. It was the smell of Yardley’s April Violets, her favorite perfume, and talcum powder, and the cold cream that she would sometimes put on her face at night. It lingered in that old nightgown for weeks and months, and Lenny would never wash it so that he could breathe in Wilma as he fell asleep. It kept her close to him.
But a few weeks ago, when Harold was over for their afternoon checker game, Lenny was desolate. He lamented to him that at last the final vestige of Wilma’s smell was gone from her nightgown. He had slept with it so long that it had begun to smell like him instead. Harold listened and shook his head in sympathy, and then the two of them ran a load of laundry together. For the first time in 14 months, Wilma’s nightgown was clean. Lenny took it to bed again with him that night, because it has become a familiar thing to him by now, a thin thread of familiarity, a comforting habit.
But Harold went on E-bay—a grand new adventure for him—and spent $37 plus shipping for a bottle of vintage Yardley April Violets cologne. At first his own wife Ruby was a little suspicious when she found him ordering cologne on the internet, but she was quickly mollified. He wrapped it in a plastic bag from the Eagle Market and left it in Lenny’s mailbox. He didn’t want to wait around for a thank-you—it would be far too difficult to hand off the cologne in person. It was just comforting to him to think that Lenny would go to bed tonight in peace.
What is it about the smells of things that goes to the very soul of our being? I read somewhere that scientists think that the source of smell in our brain is right next to the memory center—so that our deepest memories are triggered by smells. As I think about it, I am grateful that of all the little extras that God has given us in our lives, the sense of smell is one of the nicest. Maybe on Thanksgiving this year, when Kennie and Alma and Cliff and Alice and Arnold and I gather around the table, I’ll ask each of them to think of a smell for which they are thankful, a scent that rates up their with frankincense and myrrh on the holiness scale.
I can think of a few off the top of my head. I am thankful for the smell of cinnamon buns straight out of the oven, and bacon sizzling over a campfire, and onions in butter when I get ready to start supper at night. I am thankful for roses on the fence on a May afternoon, and honeysuckle covered with bees in June, and marigolds by the back door, and the odor of sweet peas, like the ones my sister carried handfuls home for my father. I am thankful for the rich aroma of cut grass and clover, and the mellow earthiness of sweet corn tassling on an August morning; for smoldering leaves in October and wood burning in the fireplaces, and for the softer scent of candles in church; for the sharp clean coldness of a winter snowfall; and the aroma of balsam as the Christmas tree is carried into the house; for the tangy smell of oranges, reminding me of those Childhood Christmases when I delighted in finding that wonderful orange in the toe of my stocking; for Thanksgiving turkey, after I get up early to put it in the oven, then go back to bed and wake up again to its rich scent filling every room; for Vicks VapoRub, smeared on my own mother’s hands as she rubbed it into my chest during a winter cold; for moth balls in the mysterious boxes shoved in the dark corners of the attic, and the smell of the cedar chest in the thick blankets pulled up to my chin on a cold winter night; for the smell of sheets that have been whipped and blown dry on a clothesline; for the smell of earth in springtime, wet and rich and ready for seed; and for the scent of cow manure, sweet and mellow and ready to be turned into that good spring earth, the symbol of life and growing things, of farms and meadows, of this good land in all its richness; and the clean smell of rain pattering onto the earth after a drought, carrying to Iowa the distant reminder of mountains and oceans from which it came. I am thankful for the smell of wet dog fur, and for all the dogs that have been our companions in life; for that tender smell when you bury your nose in that certain place on a baby’s neck, that is all innocence and delight. And I am thankful for lavender soap and peppermint and ginger snaps and the fresh sawdust on the floor in Arnold’s workshop that I keep asking him to sweep up--and even for the distant odor of a skunk on a summer night, that reminds me of all things wild and mysterious in this wild and mysterious world of ours.
All of these smells are blessings beyond our deserving and hints of what must await us somewhere beyond the boundaries of this world. Sometimes, Timothy, I even wonder what Heaven itself will smell like. The Bible doesn’t give us many clues about that. I once asked Rev. Metcalf for his expert opinion, and he just shrugged his shoulders. We have descriptions of golden streets and great gates of pearl, even of a fountain in the center of the holy city. But as for the smell, he just told me I’d have to wait and see.
But this is what I think. I think the scent of heaven could be any of those things I’ve mentioned. But when I am ready to leave this world behind, I would like to lay down on my bed and die, and then wake up to the smell of coffee drifting up to me, the kind of aroma that fills a kitchen where friends sit and play checkers, or a wife and husband hold each other for just a minute after they come downstairs and look out the window together at the last stars glimmering in the morning sky. And maybe the scent of heaven would smell like your Uncle Arnold’s flannel shirt—not anything like Yardley’s April Violets, of course, but like honest sweat and cornhuskers lotion, like earth, like love, like home.
Maybe, Timothy, we’ll all get to heaven and smell the sweetest thing we ever remember. Till then, I’ll remember all of my life's simple gifts with a full heart. And as the family gathers around our table on Thursday, and your Uncle Arnold launches in to his annual five minute Thanksgiving grace, I’ll close my eyes, and take a deep breath, and say thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Keep us in your prayers as we keep you in ours, Timothy. Happy Thanksgiving,
Love,
Aunt Tillie
