In the Ozark hills west of here last Saturday, it is a gray day. The air feels cold, mostly because the late-September temperatures have been so unusually hot. In the 90s. Not like autumn at all. The cooler temperatures are welcome, and the hot work at hand is all the more bearable.

In a small grove of oak trees, smoke is rising from a furnace built of rocks and mud. On top of the furnace is a good-sized rectangular cooker fashioned from sheets of metal. Steam rises from the liquid in the cooker, brownish-green liquid that has reached its boiling point thanks to the long, bark-covered slabs fueling the fire in the furnace.

Around the bubbling cooker stand half a dozen attentive workers using wooden ladles to skim the foam from the boiling liquid.

In a larger semicircle, still under the oak trees, are maybe two dozen people in lawn chairs, visiting mostly, having finished a carry-in dinner whose remains rest under checkered tablecloths to keep the flies away.

Off to one side of the oak trees is an old farmhouse, empty now and showing the wrinkles an old house gets when no one lives in it. At a corner of the house are two mules, muscular animals with intelligent faces. The mules are munching away and resting after a morning of steady work.

In the clearing between the old house and the oak trees is a curious device on a wooden platform. The machine is a study in heavy, thick cogs -- the kind of equipment that could swallow your arm if you weren't careful. Branching out from the machine, still dripping with some of the brownish-green liquid, is a long sapling to which the mules, one at a time, had been attached. As each mule, in turn, walks around and around the machine pulling the sapling, the cogs press together to do their work.

Willing hands feed in long stalks, harvested from the adjacent field, into the machine. Five-gallon buckets claim the juice that flow down a spout.

Early -- very early, before sunrise -- the pressing of the juice had started. Fires had been kindled in the rock-and-mud furnace. Bucket after bucket of the brownish-green liquid had been poured into the cooker.

Now, after dinner, the last of the liquid is in the cooker. While everyone keeps an eye on the boiling process, most folks have time to chat, tell stories, share recollections.

And sing. There are guitars. And an accordion. And singers who know how to harmonize gospel tunes in a way that is special to the Ozarks.

One of the men who has been skimming the foam at the cooker comes over to the cooker.

"Sing "Beulah Land," someone suggests.

In a clear voice that sounds as true as a crystal goblet tapped by a piece of silverware, the man starts in. He is joined by guitars, accordion, harmonizing voices. The musicians are joined by anyone who knows the words.

It is magic.

Other songs well up. One voice joined by instruments and sweet harmony. Not loud. Not soft. Just right for a cathedral of oak trees.

This is how they make sorghum molasses on one hillside in the Ozarks not far from here.

The annual autumn ritual has been going on in this spot for about eight years. But making molasses this way is older than anyone can remember.

This is the first time my wife and I have had an opportunity to be there for molasses making. My wife remembers her father telling about the same process in his boyhood nearly a century ago and half a state away.

I'm related to some of the people under the oak trees. The rest are friends and neighbors. Some are just curious. Some have come to help. All of them are enjoying themselves.

Here's how it all got started:

My uncle (my mother's sister's husband -- you understand how this works) grew up on a farm near Rolla. The sorghum mill -- that that pile of heavy metal cogs -- belonged to his folks. He also remembers making sorghum when he was a boy. He says the mill was old then, and he's 84 now.

Along the way, the old farm place was sold. The sorghum mill came home with my uncle who gave it to one of his sons who married a good-looking girl from the Ozark hills whose father had a farm for growing sorghum.

Should I go over that one more time?

Suffice to say the sorghum mill wound up on Bob Street's farm where he planted sorghum whose stalks were pressed into brownish-green liquid that was boiled all day to make a little bit of molasses that tastes better than any you've ever had, I guarantee.

If you had to pay for everything that goes into this molasses -- planting and harvesting the sorghum, the mules, the sorghum mill, the patient laborers to tend the cooker and so on -- the molasses comes to about $435 a quart, my cousin estimates.

But that's not what it's all about, is it?

Some of the people who have come on this Saturday morning say they don't even like molasses. So there.

Under the oak trees, a breeze comes up, blowing peacefully and contentedly as more songs are sung, more stories are told and more molasses is poured into waiting pails.

The molasses will be good this year.

~R. Joe Sullivan is the editor of the Southeast Missourian.