"There are two ways to handle a woman, and nobody knows either of them." - Kin Hubbard

We hit 98 today.
Can we please stop this? I want to be outside in the afternoon, and it's the end of October for Pete's sake.

I had a 6:30 meeting in town last night and by then it was in the mid-80's so I drove with the windows down. I'd forgotten over this long, hot summer how nice it is to smell things. I drove past fields of hay and cotton. Mmmm. I drove past Luke Air Force Base. Ugh. (Jet fuel). But even that stimulated my sense of smell, unlike the constant AC'd air we live with at home and on the road for half the year.

That drive also made me remember the smells of living in rural West Michigan, not all of which could be described as pleasant. Our house on Perry was built in 1906 by that tiny community's wealthy merchant, a Dutch immigrant named Johannes Smallegan. He owned the Forest Grove grocery store, the coal distribution business, and the slaughter house, a large and profitable operation located about 50 yards south, behind the house.

Over the years the govt. mandated regulations that made running a beef slaughter house difficult. They seemed to think sanitation standards should be rigorous and closely monitored. So for a few years the Smallegan sons (the patriarch was dead by this time) shifted to pork. After all, what can go wrong with slaughtering pigs? But soon the regulations caught up with that business, too, so they changed the facility to what's called a "dead head" operation.

That part of West Michigan has a lot of family owned dairy farms, most with 200-300 cows. What I didn't know until we moved into that house and I got to know the Smallegan family (the sons had houses down the street from "the Smallegan house" we bought) is that in a herd of that many cows a farmer will have an average of one death per month. State law allows him to bury that cow on his land, but at 12+ per year, every year, that's a lot of holes in the ground filled with cow carcasses. So he pays a firm, a dead head company, to deal with the dearly departed bovine. He makes a call, they go out with a winch-equipped truck, load up the dead cow, and take it back to their used-to-be-a-slaughter-house. There the carcass is hung up on one of the hooks left from the slaughter house days and stripped. The hide is removed and shipped to Korea where it's tanned into leather. The meat is cut off and hauled to a pet food factory on the other side of the county. And what's left is picked up by a big open-top semi that takes it to the rendering plant where it's turned into glue and fertilizer.

The farmer pays a fee, the dead head operation sells the entire carcass, and the money rolls in.
And because this was the only dead head operation for 200 miles we're talking a LOT of dead cows.

During the winter it was no problem; dead cows freeze pretty quickly. The rest of the year if the wind blew from the west (normal prevailing breeze) it was no problem because the wind carried any odor past the house. But during the hot humid days of summer a breeze out of the south....
Oh my.
Can you call up the smell of road kill? Imagine standing over that dead animal all day. Because in a 100-year old house without air conditioning all the windows and doors had to be open or you'd suffocate.

The worst of the worst were summer Mondays.
If a farmer has a cow die on Friday afternoon it lays in the field until sometime Monday morning when the dead head operation can get a truck out there to pick it up. They bring it back and hang it on a hook, but the weekend's death toll has them backed up with cow carcasses, some of which won't get tended to until Tuesday. Trust me, Lazarus had nothing on a cow dead for four days.
Now imagine that road kill is sitting in your lap.

Every evening the open-top semi from the rendering plant arrived empty and left with a load of dead cow parts. No matter which way the wind was blowing, their pass in front of our house meant dinner on the front porch had the added aroma of eau de dead cow.

But you know what? As really raunch and foul as that smell was, we didn't mind it at all. I'm not saying we liked it, but we liked what it represented - honest people making an honest living in farming. Drive through the big city and the most you ever smell is exhaust. We had the smells of nature, including the natural dead. Because it wasn't 24/7/365, because we knew that in 24-48 hours the wind would shift, it was part of country living, our preferred environment. They were there long before we bought that house; we moved into their turf.

Yeah, it could make having company over for a BBQ a little risky. And every once in awhile a farmer would drop off a dead cow after business hours and it would lay bloated on the drive into the plant. Once,when we had a group over from church on a Saturday afternoon it was a dead horse. (The kids thought that was COOL!) But that's country living.

The house was a piece of architectural art, that tiny community an almost Rockwellian setting, and the dead head operation a great conversation piece when company was over.

If only those winters weren't so absolutely brutal.