What does my country smell like?

What does my country smell like? Let me share.

In a time of globalization, centralization, blurring of borders and impersonalization, generic gifts from hypermarkets, cyber-control and dependence on plastic online communication, I believe that self-identification is becoming more important than ever before.

In Cossack folklore, there are several stories turned into legends about redeemed slaves who fell into Turkish full of young children and returned to their homeland with the help of a bag of steppe herbs and chabor. And what is now native, close, deep? What does my country smell like to me?

... . I don’t like to dust several times a week, knowing that there are places like St. Petersburg where you don’t have to do it for months. And yet, nowhere else, except for the Volgograd region, I did not meet the chalk ashes, passing through which barefoot, stepping into the enveloping warm velvet of the upper, heated by the hot sun, a layer of finest dust, rubbed with hooves, wheels and winds, diving with every centimeter deep into the ankle, into cool deep layers of delicate dust, rolling your eyes for pleasure ... It, as if the finest chalk flour, mixed with gray ash, flows between the toes, smooths the roughness of the road and sprays dust splashes on the sides of each step. You can walk without taking your feet out of a 10 centimeter layer, and then you seem to swim, cutting the ground like water, leaving in the wake of the clubs of settling gray dust. But the romance ends instantly if you decide to go down this road in shoes. My homeland smells of dust...

Getting out of the car in the steppe or moving to the side of the road, the nose immediately tickles the smell of crumpled wormwood and thyme. This bitter smell makes you breathe deeper and deeper, until the far corners of consciousness are saturated with childhood memories. About how my grandmother mixed thyme into bread, how they drank evening tea with thyme and oregano. How they tore the bitter wormwood for brooms and how they wiped themselves with the juice of wormwood so that mosquitoes and midges would not pester. The smells of these herbs have been absorbed into me since childhood. My homeland smells of thyme and wormwood.

Arriving in the forest or taiga, I admire the trees – the crowns, closing overhead, the shadow and abundance of greenery, the richness of life, which they give their permission to be. When I find myself in the steppes, I open my eyes and absorb the space, the vastness, the surrounding, asserting my determination and uncompromisingness. An agitating maw turns the steppe into the sea, flowering tulips into an endless flowerbed, the summer sun into a ruthlessly prickly obstacle course, the fiery flurry of the burning steppe into boundless ashes, the wind into a playing orchestra, any brave tree turns into an oasis, and the winter blizzard into a polar wasteland. My steppe is different, cut by ravines and beams or flat as a table, salty and dusty, eagle and fox, hot and singing ... And every time you see even one treacherous jacket, I understand – I’m home. My house smells of scorching steppe wind and space.

My country smells like watermelon. With a crackling ringing at the opening, the juice flowing down the elbows, with a crispy and sugary middle - a lamb, a juicy crust that does not need to be finished to greens. Watermelon has such a recognizable aroma and reminds me of where I came from.