Winter is coming.
I know that right now, in my hometown, the woods around my house are awash with yellows and oranges and reds. Wherever you walk, you crunch on a carpet of crisp fall leaves, their vibrant colors hiding the slowly dying grass.
My neighbors have started their wood stoves, turning down the heat to save money. After all, the wood is free. The smoke drifts higher and higher out of their chimney's, dispersing as a cool November wind hits it. When you step outside or crack a window, the first scent to hit you is the slightly acrid smell of wood smoke.
My family leaves the heat on for another week or so, perhaps a bit richer, perhaps a bit more foolhardy than the rest of the people on our street. Da wakes up early on the weekends and treks out to the woods, an ax swinging at his side, chainsaw in hand. Sometimes I'm woken up by the roar of the chainsaw as he slices dead wood into more manageable pieces.
Other times, I wake up to silence and go out to the back forty* to find him with the ax swung above his head, about to crash down on a log. I stay out there for a while, helping to split the logs so that they fit into our wood stove. The crack as the ax head meets wood, the snap as the fibers within break and tear apart, comforts me like no other sound.
The smell that's constantly on the air is different from any other time of year. It smells like winter. It's a dry smell, biting at your nasal passages as you inhale, puffing out in a small white cloud of breath as you exhale. It intensifies whenever it's about to snow, becoming something that no one could miss. Not even a California girl. It smells like nights spent in below zero weather, building an igloo in the snow outside. It's days turning the steep driving into a luge after your father had the audacity to plow the fluffy snow away. It's that peculiar time around dusk when you sit in front of the fire, wrapped in a blanket, a mug of hot chocolate in one hand and a thick book in the other. It's sitting by a window, watching as snow sparkles through the porch light, drifting and turn to carpet the ground. It's waking up in the morning and, as far as the eye can see, the ground is covered with an unbroken expanse of crystalline whiteness. It's swedish spritz and gingersnaps and that crazy icecream roll.
When you're a New Englander, it's something you feel in your bones as fall moves along, this smell is.
Right now, I live in Boston. When I crack my windows open, I smell pot and the sewer. There are hardly any trees, and what trees there are, turn wrong. But sometimes, as I'm walking to class or exiting the dining hall, I can smell the smell of winter. It's faint, struggling to rise above the chaos around it, but it's there.
I'm happy because winter break is almost here, and I'll go home to rural CowTown where all of that is.
*total and complete lie. It's more like back seven.
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the_wanlorn) wrote2005-11-16 01:36 pm
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new england sucks
and the trees are brown if not bare
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(Anonymous) 2005-11-17 06:16 am (UTC)(link)--Lando
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(Anonymous) 2005-11-18 03:57 am (UTC)(link)--Lando
hey you have a similar blog
(Anonymous) 2005-11-22 07:57 pm (UTC)(link)This blog is really similar to mine. So why don't you neighbors stop by my "hot chocolate and wood stove" blog. I'd love the company.