Fire

The smell of wood burning wafted as I rush down the stairs to the train station. On an icy autumn morning, somewhere in my building, someone is burning wood, or maybe, it was just memory tricking my sense of smell. It might well be something being cooked, or a pot of morning tea being steeped.

Nevertheless, it made me stop, look up and sigh with a little smile. It carries with it memories of mornings in Davao. Where I would wake up to the smell of leaves, branches, grasses burning, our elderly neighbors going into their rituals of sweeping through their yard each day, making a pile of dead leaves and what-have-yous and setting it on fire.


Fire. I used to swear silently at the smell, how it causes my rhinitis-prone nose to act up. How no matter how we close our house to prevent it from wafting through, the smell of wood burning always floats into our mornings.

This fall, on an ordinary day while I was rushing to work, the smell of wood burning wafts through the thousands of miles that separates me from home. I smile, inhaling it, this longing, this gratitude for the place I have come to know as home.