The smell of rotting eggs was always how we described it. I don’t know if that’s true forty years later, but as a kid it seemed an apt way to describe the odor wafting through town. Always, it floated heavy as cannabis smoke, tinging the nostrils and jerking the head as if it were a living thing craving attention. A foul fog asking for dissipation.
Maybe you’re asking yourself just what do rotting eggs smell like. One Easter when a I was kid we hunted for eggs. Back then someone would hard boil them, paint them with watercolors, and hide them in the yard. Then you would go out and fill your basket full of them. I have a faint memory of possibly eating a few at some point.
But most years I think someone would either throw them away (after a day or so) or make egg salad. One year we forgot about them, shoved them in the back of our closet, and there they sat for weeks until they began to smell like— well, like rotten eggs . I remember the horror show of finding them in the back of the closet covered in maggots.
True, the last part is an awful visual, but it punctuates the sensations of growing up in a mill town. With the smell of rotten eggs always invading your nose and white plumes of noxious gas towers looming over you at all times, a sense of dread creeps into your soul. But I do think my interpretations are subject to hindsight.
Growing up in a town smelling of rotten eggs wasn’t bothersome. Well, it was like any foul smell, you grew used to it, and didn’t smell it most of the time. You were reminded of it when you left and came back. When we drove to Monroe or Mer Rouge or McComb and re-entered the sphere of our mill town, we were reminded of its smell.
I remember it as a little tinge in the nostril. Not quite a burning sensation but what something might smell like just before ignition, or after, well after as seared chemicals waft through the air long after life has into plastic. Apocalyptic, I know, but suffice to say, living in a mill town has left a brand upon my brain.
