The Smell of Corn Growing

It’s August.  That means that the air outside my back door is just a little heavier than normal, its usual thin, clear quality laced with the subtle smell of corn growing.  If you pull the back door shut and jump right into your pickup, you’ll miss it.  But if you linger a minute on the wooden steps, breathe deeply, and let your nose sample the wares, you notice.

Corn.  Like the smell of ears boiling in the pot on Grandma’s stove, only softer and brighter, a smell the color of late afternoon, late summer’s golden sun.

Smelling corn growing is like remembering a secret that someone told you long ago, a secret that you pull out, think about for a minute, smile and be thankful, and then tuck back away until next year.  It’s a secret smell completely missed by city life; nonexistent until you live in the country.  

 I think it's the pollen.

Every embryonic, greenish-white knob of a kernel in an undeveloped ear of corn has a sticky strand of silk connected to it.  The silks grow to the end of the ear and poke out of the husk in an unruly pony tail, waiting to be fertilized with pollen.  

At the top of each plant, a tassel pokes the sky, covered with anthers that look like rice.  They are filled with tiny pollen grains to drop onto those silks waiting on the ears below. Every silk that catches some will incubate its connected kernel under the husk, until it grows into a milky yellow lump of corn.   Silks that miss remain barren, leaving an empty spot in the finished ear.

It’s all silent work, performed by three million corn plants sporting three million tassels in the field just south of our house.  When each of those tassels tosses out a few million grains of pollen, it’s no surprise that my nose on the back porch finds a few of them.

Sometimes in August, the smell of corn growing gets washed out of the air by the smell of rain. 

And that’s even sweeter.