When it rained in Bruce Springsteen’s hometown of Freehold, New Jersey, the place smelled of coffee grounds from the Nescafe factory. In his memoir Born to Run, Springsteen says that he didn’t enjoy the taste of coffee but he did like the small.

“It’s comforting,” he wrote. “It unites the town in a common sensory experience.” To Springsteen the smell of coffee meant that there was “a place here—you can hear it, smell it—where people make lives, suffer pain, enjoy small pleasures…”

In Lexington, Kentucky, it was the scent of burnt peanuts wafting from the Jiff factory or the tang of drying tobacco leaves from the auction houses on Angliana Avenue.

I never smoked but I loved that autumn bouquet. And now, if I happen to catch a whiff of tobacco, it takes me back to the land of my youth, when the local television news would carry the fast-paced patois of tobacco auctioneers and downtown Lexington smelled like a cigar bar.

Burley tobacco was a livelihood, an industry, and later a pariah and an embarrassment. But for me, it was always the aroma of home.

(Circa 1930s tobacco warehouse photo courtesy Lafayette Studios, Lexington, via the Explore UK photo archives.)