A fact of life
Lancaster is a very olfactory place.
On a good day, there used to be sort of pervasive fishy smell flowing from the river, barely masked by the odor of roasting coffee beans from Atkinson’s.
Then there was Nightingale Farm.
As is usually the case, places named in such a way rarely resemble the connotations. There were no nightingales and it was certainly not a farm – It was a rendering plant.
You know, that’s where they turn dead animals into all sorts of useful products such as glue and, strangely, animal food.
The smell of a rendering plant is hard to describe, being organic yet somehow mechanical and chemical… A little bit of death, a little bit of food and a lot of glue.
Fortunately, Nightingale Farm closed its doors for good last year. well, actually it couldn’t close its doors… mostly because they were burned down like the rest of the factory.
So that just leaves the fishy coffee tang in the air…
…and that’s not enough. It turns out that I have been triangulating my position in Lancaster using those three locations and their associated smells.
And so, if you see me, wandering around, looking desperately sniffing at the air, I’m not mad, just lost.
Philip J Schadenfreude on 
I’m not sure I would like the smell of roasting coffee beans combined with that fishy smell.
I am glad to hear that you use more then one sense to navigate your way around.
I’m fairly sure no-one does… though it is one of those ‘you get used to the smell after a few months’ affairs.
Ah. That last line sounded so poetic.
I get the impression that it’s the kind of sentence you could build an entire song around.
I’m not odd. Just an appreciator of lovely word orders.
One of the things I like about San Francisco
is the smell. Like any city, there’s the smell
of automobile exhaust, urine and fetid garbage,
but also, there is the coastal smell of the bay
and delicious restaurant smells. You can’t make
a mistake following your nose. Smell is a
reliable walking map anywhere in The City.
One of the things I noticed upon returning to Connecticut from New York on a rainy day was that I could breathe in through my nose around the puddles again, without smelling someone else’s pee.