I first smelled it when I pulled off the interstate for gasoline. At one of those pearls of commercial urbanization strung out like beads on a long, skinny necklace of asphalt and concrete threaded through hundreds of miles of cropland and riverbottoms.

Familiar, but I couldn't place it.

I smelled it again, a little before midnight, as I unloaded my bags from the SUV in the motel parking lot, surrounded by black darkness.

Kind of a mixture of freshly mowed grass, and old, dry hay.

The smell was still there when I came out the next morning. For there, not thirty meters away across the parking lot, squeezed in between us and the Wal-Mart, was...

Corn.

Acres and acres of head-high corn.

Funny I had forgotten the smell of growing corn. Not the potent aroma of corn pollen, mind you. That is so strong, so pervasive, you would recognize it anywhere, any time.

No, this was just the scent of giant grass, long past pollination. Growing tall and green, and rich with ears.

Some would say the familiarity is in the genes, but they'd be wrong. Corn is too recent in human evolution to be programmed in.

But the memories of corn?

Oh, those I have aplenty. Starting from when I was a wee toddler.

No wonder the place felt like home.