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We are the writing collective at the Urban Institute For Contemporary Arts, located in Grand Rapids, Michigan. We've been at it for over 10 years, and are one of the most published groups in the state.

Our member's output is greatly varied - genre & literary fiction, poetry, non-fiction of all stripes, essays, children's books, playwrights and script-writers in just about every genre imaginable.

A Memory Of Smoke - Steve Beckwith

From past Halloweens come memories that could only be formed by autumn leaves and bright sparks, and something else - something harder to define.


A MEMORY OF SMOKE
by Steve Beckwith

    As a child, the soil upon which my imagination fed was referred to by everyone in my neighborhood, adults and kids alike, as ‘across the creek’.
    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 homes 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, further 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 creek’ was a forbidden world of pheasant and deer, and red-hatted hunters.
    I first started exploring these wild lands when I was six, and these fields and woods became my principal reality. Family, home, chores were all illusionary when compared to time spent atop old fruit trees aiming wormy apples at fat grey squirrels. Or, digging foxholes deep into the soft black peat bog where my buddies and I would lob hand-grenade shaped quinces at each other.
    In the summers’ my buddies and I 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 north 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, scrap wood fortresses built high in the trees, and hidden treasures buried in tin cracker boxes.
    By the end of September our focus on that world across the creek would 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 in 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 tree tops.
    To this day I long for the sweet, acrid smoke of burning oak leaves. It is, more than anything the odor of my youth, I even 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, a more tangible purpose.
    Unlike my compatriots, I would still wander off on my own over the creek and tramp the autumn fields of golden wild grasses. I would walk the old orchards stomping on the rotting apples. I would let my imagination gallop free across this landscape as I watched the hunters work their dogs through the fields from my regular perch in the orchard.
    As September gave way to October, a crispness in the evening air arrived abruptly and all legacy of summer would be gone. Once November came 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 thicker until Westwood became an odd amalgam of Father Knows Best, with each dad manning his fire, rake in hand, and, a scene straight out of Dante with smoke and sparks 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 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, and a few maples.
    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 and haze 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, 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 is the smoke, the smells of fall, 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 stand across the creek behind Aunt Sue’s old house. There are still 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 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.

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About The Author:
Steve Beckwith established and has managed the UICA Writer's Workshop for the past eleven years. He has published books on a wide variety of subjects, including marketing, biography, and poetry (Epiphamatic Moments by Inland Seas Press)

Currently he writes short crime fiction for Thug Lit, and is working on two hardboiled historical thrillers: Smoke and Mirrors (set in 1919 New York), and, Alvarado Street (set in 1921 Hollywood).

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