Smell Treasures

When I was about 10 years old, my best friend and I discovered that we were fascinated by certain, strong smells. We liked the smell of mint so we decided to go through his parent’s trash to try to find a discarded tube of mint toothpaste. We found it. Mmmm, it smelled g-o-o-o-d. We also found some coffee grounds… which smelled great! We  used an empty coffee can to hold our new smell treasures. We started to mine my parent’s trash as well. A nearly-empty lipstick tube had an interesting smell and so that went into our can. The peach pit passed the test, too. Every day for a week or two we searched for, found and collected smell treasures. We put them all in our can and at the end of each day we would bury our can of treasures at the base of a pine tree in a small grove at the edge of the cow pasture that was between our houses. Every morning we would dig up our treasure and examine and smell each thing. After a while summer came to an end and school started. We hadn’t looked at our treasure in a couple of weeks when, returning home from school one day, we saw that the dairy farmer had cut down the little pine grove and had bull-dozed the stumps. We ran to look for our treasure can but we never found it.

Scroll down to see the next story. When you get to the bottom of the page, click on "Previous" to see the previous set of stories.