It was a dry June for our neighbor Tom. While occasional rain hit both nearby towns, the patch of ground on which Tom runs the CSA at Three Sisters Farm, got barely a drop. So it was a dusty first couple of pick-ups for his local subscribers.

Last week though, we had a few days of storms that drenched the whole area, including Three Sisters Farm, which was nearly flooding before it was all over. Tom was in good spirits on Monday, running to cut lettuces and garlic just as people pulled up, so that the plants could have all the time they could get in the ground.

Along with some butter lettuce and arugula, Tom lopped off a bunch of turnip greens. (”A mess o’ greens for the southern gentleman,” he said. “Don’t make assumptions, Tom,” I said.) A few of the greens were attached to baby turnips, which was a sign that we were in the last of the greens.

As soon as I got home, I sprayed the turnips to clean the top layer of dirt from them. I soaked them, roots and all, then began stemming them one by one. I soaked the leaves in several changes of cold water, then washed the individual leaves and set them out to dry.

Even though all southerners are supposed to be hard-wired to love their greens and to know what to do with them when they get them, I spent the first 20 years of my life avoiding greens. The smell and texture of a leaf, whether eaten fresh or stewed into submission, repelled me.

At some point, my palate matured, but there was a whole range of southern food that I just skipped while growing up in Alabama. They weren’t tastes and flavors I recognized as an adult; they were a missing part of my southernness that I had to approach as a stranger. Cooking with them was something I had to learn. It wasn’t something that was in me, like language is in you.

Or so I thought. But while working with those turnip greens on Monday night, I was reminded of how important our sense of smell is in guiding us, how much like language our sense of smell really is.

By the time I finished washing the greens, I hadn’t thought too much about what I was going to do with the greens. Cookthink was trying to get me to make Kielbasa With Lentils, which is a delicious dish but one that doesn’t have turnip greens in it. (Why was this happening? Since we don’t have any “turnip green” recipes in there yet, it was doing a keyword search and finding “green lentils”. We have the keyword search active as a back-up while we’re finetuning our synonym/substitute finder that will recognize “turnip greens” as being comparable to mustard greens or collards or kale or even chard.) I checked a couple of southern cookbooks, which had interesting recipes that elevated turnip greens into something that could stand as a side to a $28 restaurant entrée.

Meanwhile though, I was almost compelled to the bacon in the refrigerator, which I diced and added to a pot. And what followed was a kind of cook-by-smell session based on memories not of cooking but of just being around cooking, of it going on around me as I watched cartoons or did homework or shot baskets out back. I’m not sure I should even call them memories, because I can’t picture any of them. They don’t trigger remembrances of things past (to wallow in the food-smell-memory cliché) so much as they trigger action based on countless times not paying attention to the background but absorbing it anyway.

So frying the bacon means it’s time to chop the greens. The smell of the bacon and greens together means it’s time to dice and add the turnips and the onion and the broth. Everything stewing together, the bitter with the savory and the heat, triggers the smell of vinegar. And from there it was just a matter of tinkering until you get it right. A little honey. Some red pepper flakes. A sprinkling of salt. Dinner.

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