Welcoming the Tell

It's early morning and the sun is just peeking up over the hill that slopes upward from the house, toward scattered clouds hovering in the pale blue sky.

In the first ritual of the morning, I start pouring water into the top of the coffee maker. Then, an unexpected sight causes me to instantly halt.

A stinkbug is parked on the edge of the coffee maker's water reservoir. Yuck!

Insects — in this case, a bug pest — don't generally bother me, unless they have a stinger or blood-sucking appendage and make connection with a body part. But stinkbugs truly do STINK, with a smell that is not only disgusting, but hard to get rid of.

I flick the stinkbug away with my finger, fill the coffee maker, flip the on switch and wait for the heavenly, wake-up scent of fresh coffee. Instead, I get the lingering smell of stinkbug. Repeat: yuck.

Our world is full of scents this time of the year, when warmer temperatures and bright sunshine coax out the fragrances of so many sensuous, seasonal aromas. Stinkbugs are definitely not one of those.

Fortunately, the residual stinkbug "cloud" didn't linger around the kitchen too terribly long, replaced with the fresh scents of an early summer morning.

Climbing out of the car into bright sunshine a bit later, I was suddenly enveloped by a cloud of fragrances, their individuality so entwined the blend could be appropriately labeled "Scent of Summer." It was almost impossible to sieve out a single aroma from the combination of them that wafted across the morning breeze.

A hint of green grass lingered in the blend, likely from lawn mowing The Farmer had done the previous afternoon. Notes of the earthy aroma of sun-warmed soil blended with the sweetness arising from a pair of rose bushes in full bloom around the yard. Despite being unwanted invasives, wild multiflora roses blooming in distant fence rows probably added their spicy sweetness to the fragrance combo.

A bit of "barnyard" surely drifted into the mix as well, from the small feedlot area behind the dairy-turned-hay storage barn. With plenty of pasture and grass on which to dine and relax, the beef cattle still stroll up to the feeding area each day to linger a while and munch fragrant, fresh hay for dessert.

With acres of hay swaths cut, turned and ready for baling around our rural neighborhood, the smell of drying hay is a distinct segment of the summertime perfume. The incredible hay-drying weather experienced around the region through May kept hay-making farmers happy — on one hand — while worried about such early-season dryness on the other.

So it's of concern that one of our favorite summertime smells has remained elusive so far through much of this early cropping season. Few fragrances are more welcome after extended periods of dryness than the distinctive smell of cooling rain mixing with warm, dry soils. With nary a rain cloud on the radar, I finally resorted to dragging four hoses out of the shed, hooking them together and setting up my little, old plastic sprinkler to give the strawberries, asparagus and sugar peas a much-needed drink.

By next morning, The Farmer had outdone me, replacing my tiny, ancient sprinkler head with a "real" irrigation-type, several-feet-high one, which clicks around in a half-circle and can cover the entire garden. Its installation spurred sad memories of our shop fire, when the tall sprinkler was set up to water and drown hot spots smoldering in the ruins.

With only 10 chickens and one guinea remaining after recent devastating and repeated predation by a neighborhood fox, there's no poultry-related aroma hovering over the farm. In fact, you experience that only when you happen to step in a fresh patch of hen poop left on the basement porch, where the feathered girls insist on hanging out in late afternoon.

I’m not sure if chickens eat stinkbugs. Maybe I’ll save the next one I find and feed it to them (as a scientific experiment, of course).

And maybe the hens won't mind the stinkbug smell.

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Joyce Bupp is a freelance writer in York County, Pennsylvania.