by
Stephen Beckwith
From the street, my neighborhood was the
perfect post-war collection of starter homes. Boxy ranch houses and faux Cap
Cods constructed on large lots among the old growth oaks and sassafras. All
fifty-six houses were built in the six years between 1948 and 1954.
Horsebrook
Creek ran along the back of our property on the west side of the street. Beyond
the creek westward was a land of woods, fallow fields, abandoned orchards,
meadows, swamps, ponds, railroad tracks and, farther west, the town’s airport
runways. Beyond the airport the woods and farmland ran unbroken for sixty
miles.
This was not Christopher Robin’s tame
Hundred Acre Wood populated with sweet, befuddled English countryside
creatures. In the winter this was the Yukon, in the spring a muddy battlefield
in France. In summer we would dam up the creek and go swimming like Huck and
Tom. And in the fall, from just after the start of school, until the first
snowfall around Thanksgiving, ‘across the crick’ was a forbidden world of
pheasant and deer, and red-hatted hunters.
I first began to explore these wild
lands when I was six, and these fields and woods became my principal reality.
Family, home, chores, these were all illusionary when compared to time spent
atop old fruit trees aiming wormy apples at fat grey squirrels. My buddies and
I would dig foxholes deep into the soft black peat bog and we would lob
hand-grenade-shaped quinces at each other.
In the summers’ the gang would break
for dinner at six, gather in the field behind our house at seven, and, once
more, wade the Zambezi into darkest Africa until nine.
Horsebrook School sat atop a small
promontory on a bend in the creek three houses south of our backyard. The hill
was high enough for sledding in the winter. Every classroom window faced west
overlooking the creek and the wild lands beyond.
On those first bleak fall days when
the weather still felt like late summer we would gaze longingly out the
schoolhouse windows at a world of lost pocket knives, hidden treasures buried
in tin cracker boxes, and scrap wood fortresses cobbled together with bent
nails and weathered grey two-by-fours, built, twenty-five feet up in the canopy
of the apple trees. All with the precarious surety of an eight-year-old
carpenter’s confidence that ‘dangerous’ was a spurious adult concept.
I would, even in the forbidden fall,
wander off on my own over the creek and tramp the autumn fields of golden wild
grasses. I would walk the old orchards stomping the rotting apples. I would let
my imagination gallop free across that landscape as I watched the hunters work
their dogs through the fields from my regular perch in the orchard.
But by the end of September our focus
on that world across the creek would largely shift to the street. Westwood
Avenue was a pretty typical 1950’s Midwest neighborhood street, except that
there were no sidewalks and several large oaks sat at the very edge of the asphalt.
Every yard on Westwood had eight to
ten old growth oaks scattered around the large yards. With this many trees,
constant raking was an unavoidable fall ritual. My father would rake every
autumn evening after work and all day Saturday. Our job, my brother, sisters
and I, would be to load up an old canvas tarp with piles of the moist leaves
and drag them across the lawn to the street.
This frenzied raking and hauling would
culminate each night with Westwood Avenue ablaze. The street in spring, summer,
even winter was wide enough for two cars to pass, but in the fall the street
narrowed to one lane and a contiguous boarder of flames lined both sides of the
asphalt. My little brother and I would lie on our backs in the front yard and
watch the burning leaves lift on the hot air and float toward the treetops.
To this day I can conjure up in my
mind the sweet, acrid smoke of burning oak leaves. It is, more than anything,
the odor of my youth. I catch myself thinking of it as the singular smell of an
entire decade. In my mind this smoky world is inexorably linked to family, and
home, and a place and a time where innocence and friendship had a deeper
meaning.
As September gave way to October a
crispness in the evening air would arrive abruptly and all legacy of summer
would be gone. We knew that once the first weeks of November arrived, the grey
skies would descend and not lift again until April, but the October nights were
clear, the moon low in the west, and the stars brighter than at any other time
of the year.
The leaf smoke would grow thick until
Westwood became an odd amalgam of “Father Knows Best” and Dante’s Inferno. Each dad manned his fire, rake
in hand, while thick grey smoke and flaming leaves rose on the autumn breezes,
curling Heavenward.
By mid-October the leaves had been
collected and burned each evening in every yard except one. Three quarters of
the way down the block, in the only brick house on Westwood Avenue, lived a
widow whose husband and son had died in the war. The children of the
neighborhood knew her as Aunt Sue. Aunt Sue owned two carefully manicured
park-like lots with thirty large oaks, a few maples, and an ancient horse chestnut.
Once or twice a year each child on
Westwood would, in turn, spend the night at Aunt Sue’s. It was a long-established
tradition by the time my brother and I came along. Aunt Sue did not own a
television. You would eat cookies and talk with Aunt Sue in her parlor until
eight o’clock. You would go to sleep in her spare bedroom, her son’s old room,
and wake to a large country breakfast in the morning.
The weekend before Halloween each year
all of the parents, and children old enough to wrangle a rake, would gather to
clear Aunt Sue’s property of leaves and dead branches. The resulting pile was
as tall as a ten-year-old boy. A torch would be passed down the eighty-foot-long
pile of leaves and the conflagration would grow, burning all afternoon and into
the evening. Aunt Sue would supply the hot dogs and marshmallows and the
neighborhood, parents and children together, would sit on Aunt Sue’s grass,
leaning against her stately oaks, eating dinner and laughing until the fires
died down and darkness reclaimed the street.
These were the rituals of the season.
A time shrouded in swirls of oak leaf smoke, leading up to the climax of fall,
All Hallows Eve.
By Halloween the evening smoke had
permeated every corner of our small community and hung over the creek bed like
spring fog.
Halloween was the culmination of all
that childhood should hold for children— the unfettered imagination. The
Christmas Season may celebrate children, but it is really an adult holiday.
Halloween, however, is not simply about children, it touches the true child in
all of us, and we remember. What I remember are the smells of fall, the fire’s
warmth on a chill evening outside, and God help me it smells like the earth,
and family, and love.
As I grew older my solitary fall walks
across the creek became more introspective and, slowly, I lost the ability to
see the natural world on an equal footing. I had fallen victim to that
arrogance of age; I grew up and became the center of my world, as we
unfortunately all do eventually.
The orchard was plowed under for a
rail switching yard and the fields became an industrial park. A small copse of
trees still stands across the creek behind Aunt Sue’s old house. There still
are no sidewalks on Westwood. Leaf burning has been banned since the
mid-Sixties and the houses, built in the early Fifties, have clearly passed
their golden age.
I don’t go back to Westwood anymore.
A few years ago I was driving around
in the country on a late fall evening. I had my window down and you could smell
the snow clouds on the horizon. The crisp cold air had grown heavy with the
anticipation of a new season. I caught an old familiar scent on the wind.
Jack-o-lanterns leapt to mind, and the sweet, sour, stickiness of a caramel
apple. I remembered my father standing in the dark street, coffee mug in hand,
watching as my brother and I ran from house to house, across familiar lawns,
begging for candy.
I turned down a rutted country road
and watched a farmer and his son raking leaves into the space between the lawn
and the road. The fire danced over the leaf piles in the dusk. I stopped, got
out of my car and climbed up on the hood. I sat there leaning against the
windshield smelling the burning leaves for more than an hour. It was pitch
black outside except for a few coals glowing Halloween orange when I climbed
back behind the wheel and headed for home.
I had children of my own and nurtured
them as best I could through the prism of my own selfishness. But once a year,
when the harvest was done and the late Fall wheat was cut and stacked, when the
long sleep of winter loomed heavy over the now smokeless evenings, I would ask
my children who or what they wanted to be for Halloween. For a few moments each
fall as I waited to hear my children’s answer I could smell the oak leaves
burning and see the sparks jump on the breeze, rise up in true Halloween spirit
and pretend in those few seconds to be stars.
