Maply syrup? I wish I had it so nice. That is a far cry from the smell eminating from the Weyerhauser plant near where I grew up in Springfield. Some people don't know how lucky they are. :)

Smells can evoke such strong memories. My favorites locally growing up in the sixties: Fresh baked Franz bread wafting over into the St. Philip Neri "Little Italy" neighborhood in the early morning when spending the weekend at my grandmother's, the hops from the brewery downtown, and best of all - the mouthwatering garlic dill from the the big barrels of pickles outside Mrs. Neushin's, around the corner from Mosler's Bakery!

Sigh...

And then there was Camas when the wind was right.

When I was a kid, my grandparents used to live a short distance from Manistee, Michigan, a shipping port on Lake Michigan. Manistee had a similar situation: ten miles out, you'd smell what you'd swear was bacon, and you'd find yourself indescribably hungry. (For the vegans reading this, I realized that this smelled even more like fried oyster mushrooms with soy sauce, which makes me even hungrier than bacon.) God help you if you got closer to the battery plant that was actually responsible for the smell, because it didn't smell like bacon or oyster mushrooms once you were outside.

After years of that, the hydrogen sulfide fug of Dallas in summer as the Trinity River dries up and exposes its vast mudflats to the atmosphere is almost quaint. I used to work with a guy who'd let loose horrible pickled-egg-and-beer farts and then ask everyone around him "Hey, do you smell barbecue?"; if I die from a tumor caused by the Manistee Miasma, I'll feel just as embarrassed as I did the first couple of times I fell for Bubba's innocent question.