Fall has always been my favorite season — whether I was swishing through shin-high drifts of fallen leaves on my way to school or stomping on acorns and trying to pop them — even though I was probably allergic to all of it. (My allergist once said, “I call it the witching season, and not just because of Halloween.”)

Still, I love the crisp tang in the air, the leaves turning bright colors, the bird calls which seem to travel a little farther in the no-longer-soggy fall air and how my very favorite smell starts dancing on the breeze. No, not Pumpkin Spice, which I regard as the “Hallmark greeting card” of the aroma world.

I am talking about that wood smoke smell, drifting around the neighborhood, invisibly lifting my spirits.

I believe that the burning of leaves has been banned, here on Long Island, and probably wood is next — which makes that aroma all the sweeter to encounter. There is just something about it that brings back happy memories.

Some of my happiest are of raking leaves in our back yard with my father and brothers, making one big pile, and — what else? — jumping joyfully in and out of it with my brothers until essentially we had undone all the work of raking. Then my father would rake it all back in — in one tenth of the time without our “help” — and light the bonfire, while we all stood around watching it burn. There were no big plastic bags of leaves at the curb (and shouldn’t those bags be made of something that burns cleanly anyway? Like paper?). This this is just what everyone did with their leaves.

Dad always had a fire in the fireplace for the first night of Chanukah, and usually also for Thanksgiving. But I never paid much attention to the minutiae of how to stack the wood, or layer in the smaller twigs, until Hurricane Sandy hit us here in Long Island, knocking out the power on the North Shore for 10 increasingly colder days and nights. That’s when my husband and I finally brushed the cobwebs out of our fireplace and let our high school-age son make a fire in it, almost every one of those nights. He got very good at it.

Sitting around a campfire is easily the best part of any camping experience. This is true even though it somehow always means putting up with those stories people feel required to tell about the one-handed maniac, creeping up on the teens in a car on Lover’s lane, whose bloody prosthetic claw is discovered hanging from the car’s door handle after the kids have driven away. Now that car doors have nothing to hook onto, I no longer fear him!

Campfires also meant the making and consuming of s’mores — which usually led, at least for me, to a burnt marshmallow and burnt roof of the mouth. Patience was never my best virtue.

My favorite campfires of all time were the ones our leader started every morning of my high school group’s two-week trip around the American West. These featured the aromas of bacon and coffee, commingled with that lovely wood smoke. If only I could find an alarm clock that released a puff of that every morning, I think I could almost have become a morning person.

The evening campfires were almost as wonderful, except they were invariably followed by KP (Kitchen Patrol) duty where, according to the group leader, I slowed down the whole process no matter what station he put me on. I, of course, saw it differently; is it so wrong to want to clean EVERY leftover morsel off the plates? Rinse ALL the suds away? Or get the dishes actually dry? This is also where I learned it is apparently a mortal sin — a capital offense almost — to clean a skillet that has been coated in years’ worth of grimy bacon grease. OK, so now I know.

I don’t know how much longer we will be allowed to have these lovely experiences. Climate change is a real thing, as Hurricane Sandy finally drummed into my reluctant brain, and I do understand that it is hastened a little bit by every fire that turns locked-up-carbon, be it in coal or wood, into carbon dioxide and smoke. That is why I intend to make the most of every minute we’ve got, from now on. So if you see me wandering around my neighborhood, nose first and long after Halloween, at least you’ll know why.

Happy Autumn!