Kennett Square, PA

My grandmother is from Newtown Square. Newtown, not Oldtown. They’ve all got new houses, new cars, new money.

Kennett Square is not quite old, but it’s not that type of new either. We have abandoned houses, run-down apartment complexes, no hotels—there’s only one parking garage in the entire town. No one comes to Kennett Square.

Except for Easter dinner. Nana comes from her new house in her new car. She slams the door of her BMW, and I know what she’s going to say: Oh, good Lord! It sm-

“It always smells like shit in this God-damned town.”

“I know, Nana. That’s because it’s literal shit that you smell.”

Kennett Square is the #1 Mushroom Capital of the World—and we wear that badge proudly. I never got it; why couldn’t we make the best pizza, or sell the most milk, or, at least, why couldn’t we be the number one carrot capital? Because no one likes mushrooms.

And because it stinks. I swear I’ve showered, it’s just the Kennett Square you smell on me. It’s the mushroom farms that use cow waste to fertilize their fungi. You really can’t escape it until you’re a good ten miles down Route 41—yeah, there’s not much to do in Delaware, but at least it doesn’t smell like shit.

I escaped. I could’ve stayed, gone to community college, but I was real tired of the smell. The smell kind of consumes you, envelopes you in its waft of twelve-hour shifts of blue-collar work, underpaid and taken for granted. I used to smell it and anticipate summer camp, fishing with Grandad, swimming in the pool at the Y. But that’s all gone, and since then I’ve just wrinkled my nose and wished it would go away and that Nana would stop complaining. It started to remind me of my own minimum wage job, the fact that I had to grow up, that my mom needed me out of the house because my brother already cost her too much. If I wasn’t getting my American Dream, six-figure, corporate office job here, there was nothing left for me in Kennett Square.

New York City is very new. To me, at least. There is a backdrop of bustling crowds, rumbling voices, glimmering lights. I’m drowning in the constant activity of over eight million people and yet I feel more independent, more free, more human than I did among the eight thousand in Kennett Square. So I like it; if it’s anything different from Kennett Square, of course I’m going to like it. And it’s about the farthest I could get from Kennett Square and its dried-up swimming pool and its trudging work and its mushroom stench.

Since being here I’ve forgotten about Kennett Square, distracted by finally starting my life, making new friends, finding new, exciting, terrifying experiences by the day. I don’t remember the last time I had so little time to relax—and was so happy about it.

There are subtle things, though, that make me think of Kennett Square. When I pass two men engaged in lively conversation and suddenly I’m in high school, walking through its Spanglish-speaking halls. When I walk through Central Park and anticipate that around the bend will be the bridge I used to cartwheel across. Especially when I get a whiff of the sweat-sewage-sulfur stench. There’s nothing quite like the smell of cow pies baking under the sun, but the odor of New York City may be the only one that can rival it.

They make me think of Kennett Square more than miss it. They make me think of the regular at my minimum-wage job who would help me practice my Spanish as I rang her up. They make me think of my friends who would love it here, who I wish could’ve escaped too. They make me think of the Easters when Nana never commented on the putrid smell, the summers before Grandad died. They make me think of the Kennett Square smell, and how it might actually be more manageable than the smell of urine mixed with exhaust mixed with wet dog. I guess that’s a way of missing. I never thought I would miss that Kennett Square smell.