Simple Autumn Pleasures

 I live outside of Augusta in a community that is adjacent to the huge Army Post, Fort Gordon.  There are two events that take place every fall and winter on the post and both are well publicized locally. 

In the fall there is a cleanup of the autumn leaf fall and the refuse is burned over a period of a few days in late October or early November. After Christmas there is another gathering of all the Christmas trees that were erected at the fort and by the military living off post.  Once again, a large controlled burn takes place.

The smoke from these two fires can be seen for miles. If you happen to live downwind from the fort you can also smell that aroma of burning leaves and trees. It brings back childhood memories for me.

It amazes me that there are literally millions of people who have never smelled the aroma of burning leaves in the fall. I don’t know when the municipal ban of leaf burning took effect, but it must have been sometime back in the “politically correct” 1970s.

For those of you city-dwellers who have never experienced this, you don’t know what you’re missing.  It was an annual fall chore to rake the fallen leaves from all the trees on our property and pile them at the curb. 

When the pile was large enough—sometimes we had to rake and build several of them—the younger set usually played a game of diving into the pile to “smoosh it down.”  Of course, that necessitated re-raking and forming the pile anew, but the fun we had was worth the extra effort.

After all the shenanigans were completed, the next thing we did was to light the pile and burn the leaves.  It was all done with adult supervision, and I don’t recall anyone setting their property or their house afire.  And since most people on the street took part in this annual activity, it was common to have several leaf piles burning simultaneously up and down the street.

The neighborhood was always aromatic with that smell of burning leaves for about a week or more during the late fall, usually right around Halloween.

If you are one of those who missed out on the fall phenomenon of leaf burning, I feel badly for you.  Unless you happen upon a forest fire, now called wildfires for some strange reason, you’ll never know what I mean when I call the smell 'aromatic'.  I cannot provide you with the odor, but here is a picture of what the activity might have looked like back in the good old days. Notice that those are kids doing the raking and burning, and they’re doing a pretty good job of it too.

 

As a footnote, that leaf raking and leaf burning activity also provided a pretty good chore that the ambitious kids could use to earn some spending money.  There were always some people who were willing to pay a teen to perform the task for them, so it was one of the chores, along with lawn mowing and snow shoveling, that we could use to augment our allowances.  It’s too bad that today’s youngsters don’t seem to have that work ethic.