Animal, Vegetable, Miracle_ A Year of Food Life - Barbara Kingsolver [57]
We had planned our escape for late June, the one time between May planting and September harvest when it seemed feasible to take a short vacation from our farm. If we’d been marketing to customers or retailers, this would still be a breakneck time of getting orders lined up and successive plantings laid out. Our farming friends all agree this is the most trying challenge of the job: lost mobility. It’s nearly impossible to leave fields and animals for just one day, let alone a week. Even raising food on our relatively modest scale required that we put in overtime to buy a respite. We mulched everything heavily to keep root systems moist, discourage weeds, and prevent late blight.
My favored mulching method is to cover the ground between rows of plants with a year’s worth of our saved newspapers; the paper and soy-based ink will decompose by autumn. Then we cover all that newsprint—comics, ax murderers, presidents, and all—with a deep layer of old straw. It is grand to walk down the rows dumping armloads of moldy grass glop onto the faces of your less favorite heads of state: a year in review, already starting to compost.
Believe it or not, weeds will still come up through all this, but it takes a while. With neighbors on call to refill the poultry waterers, open and close coops, and keep an eye on the green things, we figured on escaping for a week and a half. Our plan was to head north in a big loop through New England, up to Montreal, and back through Ohio, staying with friends and relatives all along the way.
We nearly had the car packed when it started raining cherries. We’d been watching our huge cherry trees, which every June bear fruit enough to eat and freeze for pies and sorbets all year long. This, plus our own sparse peaches, plums, Asian pears, and a local orchard’s autumn apples, were the only local sources of tree fruits we knew about, and we didn’t want to miss any of them. Our diet had turned our attention keenly to fruit, above all else. Like the Frostburg man with his eighty-three mealy peaches and so forth, we wanted our USDA requirement. This winter we’d be looking at applesauce and whatever other frozen fruit we could put by ahead of time, at whatever moment it came into season. Tree-ripened fruit, for the local gourmand, is definitely worth scheduling your vacation around.
Last year, my journal said, the cherries had ripened around June 8. This year summer was off to such a cool, slow start, we stood under the tree and tried to generate heat with our heart’s desire. Then it happened: on June 15, one day before our planned departure, the hard red spheres turned to glossy black, all at once. The birds showed up in noisy gangs, and up we went to join them. Standing on ladders and the roof of the truck, we picked all afternoon into dusk, till we were finding the fruits with our fingers instead of our eyes.
Like the narrator of Kazantzakis’s Zorba the Greek, I have a resolute weakness for cherries. Annually I take Zorba’s advice on the cure; so far it hasn’t worked. All of us were smitten, filling gallon buckets, biting cherries alive from their stems. This was our first taste of firm, sweet fruit flesh in months, since the early April day when we’d taken our vows and foresworn all exotics. Fruit is what we’d been hankering for, the only deprivation that kept needling us. Now we ate our fill, delivered some to neighbors, and put two gallons in the freezer, rejoicing. Our fructose celibacy was over.
The next day our hands were still stained red as Lady Macbeth’s, but it was time to go, or we’d never get our trip. We packed up some gifts for the many friends whose hospitality and guest beds lay ahead of us: cherries of course, bottles of local wine, and a precious few early tomatoes we