Some just-nippy mornings it wafts on the air as lightly as the fragrance of apple blossoms in spring.
When day breaks over autumn’s sequined blankets of frost, however, it lays heavy over the fields, rich, pungent and as invigorating as the cold itself.
It is the smell of oak wood burning— that aroma which arouses the senses to the surety of winter, bespeaks of Ozarks timberlands and revives memories of childhoods spent cutting, splitting and “warming twice,” as old-timers would say, to its bone-deep heat.
For many Ozarkers, nothing more distinctly marks us as hillmen than our savor of the smell of oak. The sweetness of sawdust flying from the teeth of a crosscut or chainsaw is like that of honey to a bear, and the smoke from our woodstoves and fireplaces our most favored incense.
To be sure, we’ve no love of great clouds of the stuff, such as on those times when the stove pipe is bumped from the flue and the house fills with eye-scorching smoke and black soot.
It’s the difference between a toad-strangler that takes out water gaps and a clear, mountain spring. Both are just water, somebody might say. But, we all know they’re not, no more than the fire that warms a fellow’s backside is the same as the one that burns down his barn.
Well, maybe they are a lot the same. It’s just a matter of portion.
Most things we savor most in life don’t serve us nigh so well in overly generous portions. But, I’m straying.
The subject is oak, white oaks or post oak, mostly. Red oak or blackjack will do, but they don’t burn quite as sweet. Hickory, I’d rather have, though it burns a mite hot and fast.
Fact is, it’s other folks’ post oak smoke I generally savor most, inhaling deeply as I take my autumn and winter morning walks into town.
As dawn comes over these prairie lands just west of the Greasy Creek hills, smoke curls from chimneys of old farm homes, rising skyward and fading into the heavens— wholly invisible, but for its lingering perfume on the crisp air, like a spirit which visits for but a moment, but whispers through the ages.
Oak smoke: If they could bottle the stuff, it might be used to keep old men, boys and dogs at home. Come to think of it, from what I’ve read, some folks may have come pretty close, aging their spirits in barrels of charred oak.
Reckon I’ll just stick with my morning walks, though, and hope all my woodburning neighbors keep feeding their fires and intoxicating my senses with sticks of oak.
Copyright 2024, James E. Hamilton; email jhamilton000@centurytel.net
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