Woodsmoke and Ice Crystals
...knowing someone out there is warm
Someone in my neighbourhood has a wood burning fireplace.
I can smell the woodsmoke on my morning walks, and again in the afternoons as I walk the dog through an increasingly frozen maze of residential streets.
To some, this won’t seem strange or odd at all. Woodstove and fireplaces are wonderful sources of light and heat, as well as comfort during the logest and darkest months of the year. However, I live in the largest city in my province; a province fueled, not by the foresty industry, but by fossil fuels buried deep below the Earth. “This is Oil Country” and “I love Alberta Oil and Gas” stickers adorn more than half of the bumpers and rear windows of the trucks I pass on these walks.
For someone to choose to source, at least a portion of their heat from firewood over gas feels like a slightly bigger deal here somehow.
As I meander along through the ankle deep snow, Poppie snuffling at snowshoe hare and red squirrel tracks, I can’t help but feel uplifted by the scent. It brings me back to so many memories sprinkled, like the ice crystals forming on my eyelashes, throughout my life.
What is is about the smell of wood smoke that warms our souls, even when the fire itself remains out of sight, as this one does for me?
Is it the happy memories that come flooding back, bringing with them the echoes of songs sung, meals made and stories shared around the countless campfires of my youth and early adulthood? Surely that has something to do with the smile now resting gently on my face - so many campfires to recall - but I have a feeling there’s something more primal, more elemental about how it touches the soul of a person too.
Maybe there’s a part of my brain, a more ancient part, that remembers the smell of woodsmoke as a source, not only of warmth and community, but of safety. A genetic memory of a time when the smell of a fire burning meant food would be cooking, and the darkness that dug it’s long fingers under the flap of the tent or the crack of the door was being kept at bay. The smell bring with it a certainty that the ice crystals forming on not only my eyes, but my hair now as well, would soon be nothing but water vapour as our clothes steamed in front of the flames.
Even though the fire is burning in someone else’s hearth,as we turn down the cut-through and head for our own home, it’s as if I can feel the heat from those flames warming my own heart. Oddly enough, my faith in humanity feels a little bolstered by the imagined glow of those unseen flames and whoever might be warming themselves there.
xx
Love the way this piece evokes emotion and connects the reader to their own experiences of being around a fire, and then to the generations of people who have done so before us. Funny, I experience something similar when I bake bread, like I am connecting to all my ancestors who did so hundreds of years ago. Thanks for sharing this 🙏