Honeysmoke

The smell of woodsmoke reminds me of that first winter in the old farmhouse. The chimney had been closed off for twenty years, at least that’s what Roger Loe told us and he seemed to know such things. “Bees moved into it and the Bells just capped the chimney and stopped usin’ it. Figured the new oil stove would do the trick. Long as I can remember there’ve been bees in it.”

We needed the chimney. The rusty oil stove in the dining room dripped one drop at a time into the burn box, and that first winter it kept that room at about fifty degrees as the winter winds rattled the windows and blew in under the doors. Upstairs, the bedside cups of water froze solid, in fact I had to sew hoods on the kids’ pajamas, so they too wouldn’t freeze!

Putting a woodstove into the living room was definitely necessary, so Jim, by stapling old screening around his head, figured out how to protect himself from bees. After that, he tied a rope to the wooden pillar on the front porch, attached a rock to the end of the rope and flung it over the roof. Support rope in one hand and a shovel in the other, he climbed the roof, uncapped the chimney and addressed the situation. I, in the meantime, was stationed down in the living room where I removed the cap on the stovepipe hole and faced a solid wall of ancient, crystallized honeycomb. My job was to dig this out, one trowel full at a time, and dump it into the tall, plastic diaper pail, which was the largest container we could find around the house.

As Jim smashed at towering columns of honeycomb, a thick, slow flow of amber honey and wax and dead bees and larva and creosote and lime mortar and who knows what else, oozed out the stovepipe opening and into my pail; we guessed we hauled out about four hundred pounds that day, and that is when we installed the woodstove and had an unexpected bonus....honey smoke!

All winter long the woodstove kept us toasty and warm, and on misty days when I’d be out working in the barn or pruning the orchard, tendrils of the sweetest woodsmoke would sweep down from the chimney and infuse the moist winter winds with the aroma of well seasoned blackberry honey. To this day, the taste of honey reminds me of fog and bleating lambs and overgrown orchards and our family nestled by the light of the Defiant woodstove on Party Night.