“What Smells Remind You of Childhood?” Audacious with Chion Wolf
My interview with the incredible Chion Wolf is up! We talk about the Kerns Bakery, Moonbeams pencils, the Lawson McGhee Library, and the smell of being poor.
“There’s one smell from childhood that by far stands above the rest, and that’s the smell of being por. I would describe that smell as, kinda like a mix of bacon and cigarettes. That might sound great, because you might be thinking, “Oh, like a diner at 2am where you and your friends are having breakfast and chain smoking and talking about everything from capitalism to John Waters movies.”
“But, it’s really more like, reused grease from thousands of cheap fried meals that has soaked into your pores, and the smell of stale smoke that has yellowed the walls years before you moved in, plus the fresh smoke from your Mom’s pack of Basic 100s.
It smells like the 2 housing projects I grew up in, and the series of cramped apartments, and the trailer we moved into after Daddy died when I was 11.
It smells like lack.
It smells like shame.
It smells like your name hanging off the branches of the Angel Tree.
It smells like camouflaging the stink of it with heavy-handed spritzes of Avon perfume or glugs of fabric softener in the washing machine.
It smells like self-diminishment, trying to be worthy of a someone’s charity.
But...it also smells like hope, because you know that it could always be worse, and it might even get better.
It smells like your teachers pooling their money together to buy you clothes for Christmas in 7th grade.
It smells like your mom working two jobs in order to put food on the table.
It smells like your sweet neighbor who’s a veterinarian, giving your dog, Cookie, free medical care because your mama couldn’t afford it and you and your sissy loved that dog.
And most importantly, it smells like compassion. It smells like empathy, because almost no one who had ever smelled poor wants anyone else to go through what we did.
Many of us have become hand holders, reaching out to others to help lift them up.
Some of us are dealmakers or hustlers or whatever we need to be politically and personally to make sure that people we care about don’t ever have to smell poor.
We are chain breakers.
And that’s why the smell of being poor is my favorite, because it created something fragrant in me out of something rotten.”
