Autumn Magic

Several years ago, at a writers conference, one of our assignments was to write a piece related to one of the five senses. An article about touch, or sound or the scent of something that carried memories. I was stumped for sime time until later in the day, as I was going out for a bite to eat, that something cought my eye. In the bed of my truck, stuck down in the mud that gathers in the corners, I found an old dried up black walnut. I picked it up and sniffed it. Mostly it smelled of mud, but if you scratched that wizened, cast iron surface, burised it, it was time travel made real. 1952- August, September, October, somewhere in there.

There were an even dozen old massive black walnut trees across the front of our yard. As a child, they marked the boundary between the yard and the road. They ran straight up and disappeared into the sky. In late summer, green globes would drop with a solid thunk into the grass, thousands of them. The neighborhood kids would gather them up, pull the thick husks off, stack them and have "Black Walnut Wars." They flew like round black rocks through the air, were nearly lethal when they connected, and left baby shit yellow stains on everything they touched. A stain that was impossible to get out.

The trees themselves shed leaves that looked exactly like the green spearmint gumdrop candies in Lilly Everhart's crystal candy dish. Thousands of leaves, millions of them. And by October, there would be a literal sea of them.

My Father would go out to the garage, gather up the rake and bushel baskets and together we would start the old ritual. I was five, he was forty-seven. How clearly I can see him, in his spotless wing tips, polished to a gleaming perfection. There was a wonderful sweeping M across the toe of each shoe and an intricate pattern of pinholes. He always wore dress slacks, creased to a knife-edge, cuffed, Hershey bar brown, and an undershirt - not a T-shirt, but an undershirt. And finally his snap brim, pussy willow gray, velvet to the touch fedora. He was success and wealth at play.

He would rake the leaves into great piles and I would run laughing, through them. You could stand up, arms spread wide and fall back, back, and they would crash and crackle and catch you and cave in on you. They smelled of the wind and the light and that sharp pungent faintly bitter odor of the trees themselves. I would pick them up by the armload like laundry and bury my face in them.

Then the real magic would begin. Dad would take a wooden kitchen match from the recesses of his pocket and snap his thumbnail across its white tip. There would be a flash and a blaze and the small of sulpher. He would lower the match solemnly, his hand cupped to protect the flame, and hold it against the mass of leaves. They didn't burn with a fury, but slow and red glowing around the edges and ashy and silver behind the flame. The smoke would curl and climb and contort into seahorse shapes and I would empty my lungs, expel all the air I could and then slowly, slowly breathe in, in , in, again and again. the scent compelling and intoxicating.

How little I knew that in those moments, I was committing to memory the very essence of childhood. The love of a child for a Father, the innocence of a time long gone, and the pure unadulterated joy of being five.

My father is long gone. He died suddenly the summer I was thirteen. And it is more years later than I care to count, but even now in the fall, I can catch on the breeze, the haunting unmistakable odor of burning leaves, and once again I am in the front yard of that old house in Effingham, with my Dad, and We are laughing.