There will be a day this fall when you walk outside your residence hall or East Lansing apartment and smell something funny.
City kids on campus will wrinkle their noses and wonder, “What is that smell?”
Maybe they’ll have a flashback to their suburban elementary school’s field trip to a farm.
But the country kids, like myself, will know exactly what we’re smelling. It’s the perfect combination of a slight breeze off south campus and freshly spread manure on University Farms.
It’s crap.
And not only can I tell you that, but I can tell you from what kind of animal it originated.
I grew up on a hog farm with dairy farms on either side of us, so no matter which way the wind blew, we were screwed.
I rarely mention to anyone my agri-girl background. My friends know most of my best stories to tell over pitchers of beer involve my near-death experiences with large animals and farm equipment I shouldn’t be allowed to use. But for the most part, I don’t tell people I grew up on a farm because I don’t want to deal with their cities-are-superior attitudes.
“Really, a farm? I would have guessed you were from around Detroit.”
See, I fool people by not wearing my Carhartt coveralls to class and scraping the pig poop off my flip-flops.
During the past four years I’ve dealt with a lot of city-kid assumptions about farms and farm life. Some were inquisitive, some were moronic.
A few of the things I’ve had to explain:
But the most annoying assumption about farm life is it’s a lesser way to grow up and my parents farmed because they weren’t smart enough to do anything else. Otherwise they surely would have moved me to the city where I could grow up “proper.” Both my parents are college-educated, Mom even has two degrees. Farming is a business and it takes a pretty smart cookie to run a 2,000-head hog farm.
Sure, schools in metropolitan areas offer more classes than were offered to my 46 classmates and me in my Class D school.
But I went to a school where every teacher knew my name and honestly cared about my success. At my school the kids who would have sat the bench in larger schools were all-stars. There’s something to be said for that.
And no, Lawrence, Mich., doesn’t have a museum or art gallery or cultural center. We don’t even have a McDonald’s. But my back yard and personal playground was about 400 acres and my mom didn’t have to worry about my safety when I rode my bike two miles to a friend’s house.
And it’s a fact that at night there are more stars in the sky over the country than the city.
Most of my city friends had a dog growing up, maybe a cat. To date I’ve had six horses, a dozen dogs and a whole barn full of cats. And that’s not counting the summer of 1993 when I decided I wanted to raise chickens. Nasty animals.
Most of the truly important things I’ve ever learned were not taught to me at MSU, but when I was a 5-year-old kid with boy-short hair (having short hair made it easier for my mom to get the burrs out - you wouldn’t think a kid could get burrs in her hair more than once, but I was a trooper) and I really did wear Carhartt coveralls.
I learned about life when my dog gave birth to a bunch of slimy, gooey puppies.
I learned about death when a sick calf died as I petted it and cried.
I learned about being gentle when during the winter, the barns were full and my dad would bring a litter of piglets in the house to keep them warm. I’d bottle-feed them and hold them until they fell asleep. I also learned piglets have very small bladders.
So no, city kids, I’m not at all jealous of not growing up urban. I’m quite proud to be a farm kid.
In my mind the crappiest thing about it was, well, the smell.
Mary Sell, State News editor in chief, can be reached at sellmary@msu.edu when she’s not busy roping steers to feed her craving for a London Broil.
