There’s a tree outside of Frank Lloyd Wright’s home and studio in Oak Park, Illinois that smells. It really, really smells.

I hadn’t thought much about that tree until I got a response to a letter that I wrote to Modern Letter participant Kathy, in Wichita. In addition to sharing tales of tomato-hungry rabbits ravaging her yard and plans for her upcoming trip to Paris, Kathy also happened to mention that she’s a huge fan of Frank Lloyd Wright and has traveled to Oak Park to visit his famed home and studio.

Oak Park--once home to the aforementioned architect, Betty White, Ernest Hemingway and me-- is inoffensive as far hometowns go… though in high school we called it "Kao Krap," and it might be worth noting that Hemingway called it a town of, “wide lawns and narrow minds.” All in all, it wasn’t bad: growing up there we had easy access to Chicago and could pretend to be cool at Smashing Pumpkins shows.

But back to the tree.

In grade school, we took annual field trips to Frank Lloyd Wright’s home and studio. As our two-by-two buddy system line approached the ginkgo tree growing outside of the studio, there was an impending sense of doom among the female half of the class. We knew we were about to be slimed with the repulsive-smelling innards of the ginkgo fruit strewn about the sidewalk. The boys, usually uninterested in us, developed a keen sense of boy gross-out duty on Home and Studio day and year after year we left with sticky, smelly hair.

To verify and identify the origins of the odor, I consulted About.com’s forestry expert Steve Nix’s aptly titled entry:

Stink-bomb Tree
The female plant, when fertilized, produces the oval, slimy, tan-orange ginkgo fruit. The fruit stinks! The smell's description ranges from "rancid butter" to "vomit.”

Vomit. Rancid butter. Sounds about right. What’s also worth noting is that the ginkgo goo I’m talking about is the very same goo that you find in those ginkgo biloba memory-enhancing supplements, leading me to believe that even if I wanted to forget this, I probably couldn’t.

Kathy’s letter got me thinking about this tree and those annual field trips--a memory that connects me to all of the other kids who grew up in Oak Park. I feel like we share a small secret about a famous place. Are there destinations like this in your hometown? What do you remember when you hear other people talk about them? Have any of your letters provoked these memories?

Hello, everyone. May 2007 letters will be going out shortly. We are going to attempt to do a massive mail merge again (last month Corie did it by hand), so please be patient if your address looks a little funky-- Excel and Outlook tend to read fields as numbers instead of text. As a result, if a ZIP code starts with zero, it cuts it off.

Keep an eye out for your new MLP sendee some time late next week. Also, we'll be checking in with everyone again this month about their letters, just to make sure that people aren't being left out, etc.

Happy letter writing!