The Sweet Smell of Silage

I could never live in the city. My dependency on the forest notwithstanding, there is just something so special about the country. Of course, the abundance of trees in Maine is a plus, and I love that it takes 20 minutes to get everywhere. Today was gorgeous. Because my rear-view mirror just fell off, I had to drive to my parent's house so that my Dad could fix it. The drive in summer time is sublime. I normally don't drive with my windows down, since it's loud and I have very long hair, but the fresh air and the green was too tempting.

Sorry about the bug guts

There are certain places where I can see my other self running alongside the car, almost like they are secret places although they are so close to the road:

in a larger format, this looked so much better

The smells are another thing I love about living in the country. When I was growing up, just a short walk up the road lived my second cousins and sometimes babysitter. My second cousin had a farm, of sorts. Horses once, then just cow corn (read: feed corn) and hay. And one stinking silo. I'm not talking the tall silos you see that hold tons of grain, this is a low, long concrete trough almost, that gets filled with cow corn and hay, covered with a plastic tarp that's sealed down with old tires and left to ferment. The result is silage, and it smells awful. A sickly-sweet, sour smelling concoction that they feed to milk cattle around here. But... it's a smell you grow to expect. Like the smell of cows and cow manure when you go by the dairy farm, it's just there, and it's noticed when it's not there. And while we're talking about cattle and the things they eat:  there are a lot of hay fields around here. It's something people do for a little extra money, they hay their fields and sell the bales. And oh man, it smells good when it's fresh.

It smelled amazing to drive by this freshly hayed field

Oh, and have I mentioned you can see all the stars at night? All the stars. No light pollution! Take that, bright lights of Vegas!

Anyway I can go on and on about this topic and still not be done. But I covered the ones that were really on my mind: cow shit and hay.