October 15: Leaf Smoke

There are sound reasons for not burning leaves.  Their smoke adds to the urban smog, their smoldering flames create a fire hazard, and unburned leaves make good mulch and compost.  Burning them is both wasteful and hazardous, so nowadays enlightened folk either compost Autumn leaves or let the trash men haul them away.

But now and then some suburbanite or villager forgets all these good reasons, or ignores them, and rakes a pile of leaves into some safe place and burns them, for his own good reasons.  When he does, other nostalgic people sniff the evening air and remember forgotten Autumns when leaf smoke was the incense of October evenings.  Leisurely, uncrowded evenings, uninterrupted by television, unhurried by the delusion of protracted daylight saving time.

It isn't only the leaf smoke, pungent as it is.  It is all the other remembered fragrances of the season, the spiced aroma from the pickling kettle in the rural kitchen, the acrid scent of walnut hulls, the smell of roasting chestnuts, the beady tang of apple cider, the savory simmer of mincemeat in the making, the tantalizing smell of pumpkin pie in the oven.  It is frosty mornings, and Indian Summer days, and the hearthside smell of wood smoke curling from an evening chimney.

It is wasteful, unwise, in some places illegal leaf smoke.  And yet it is October and Autumn evenings and remembered years.  If you are middle-aged, don't allow yourself to smell it or you will wonder what happened to those years.