This Life Is in Your Hands_ One Dream, Sixty Acres, and a Family Undone - Melissa Coleman [30]
The orchard distinguished itself from the forest by the bent and gnarled stature of trees possessing the dignity of Scott’s aged yet sturdy frame. Papa climbed the bunioned trunks of Northern Spys and Baldwins to shake the branches, apples hailing down with thuds onto the grass below as Mama followed to collect them into burlap bags. She paused now and then and bit into a fruit, savoring its crispness as she watched Papa swing down from a tree, land solidly on his feet, and head for another, the pale light of the waxing moon catching the youthfulness of his features. By the time the moon was high, they carried their bounty of apple-lumped bags to the jeep and placed them around my sleeping body. Whooping like Indians once they passed the darkened houses of town, headlights off in the moonlight, they returned home to put their loot in the root cellar. Bounty was where you found it.
“It’s amazing what we can store in the root cellar,” Papa explained to anyone who would listen. We had a small cellar under the trapdoor in the kitchen floor and another built like an underground cabin in the rise above the garden. For the most part, the cellars maintained a thirty-seven-degree temperature in winter and low fifties in summer. Those bags of apples could last for months. The same for brassicas like cabbages and brussels sprouts. Potatoes, turnips, celeriac, carrots, and other root vegetables were stored upright in sand or in buckets. If left too long, they grew masses of white roots and eventually turned to stinky mush, but by that time we usually had early crops growing in the greenhouse.
As Papa did in the garden, Mama was constantly planning ahead for our food storage, preparing now in order to feast later. She used her Foley food mill to transform boiled apples into golden jars of applesauce, some with raspberries, blackberries, and blueberries added for a taste sweet as pie. She carefully canned the overabundance of late-summer vegetables with boiling water in mason jars sealed with canning lids. Her favorite concoction was a mix of tomatoes with basil, oregano, onion, garlic, zucchini, and cauliflower that could later be made directly into a hearty winter soup. She also dried apple and carrot slices, blueberries, beans, peas, and corn on the cob in the wood oven on low heat, as they’d read that drying best preserved a food’s nutrient value.
This was all long before Martha Stewart became a household name, though today’s homemaking maven has admitted to being inspired by the Nearings. Back then, Mama was doing the kinds of housework many women believed they’d left behind with their virginity in the 1960s. Rather than resenting the work, she found solace in the repetitive nature of what were already becoming the lost arts of the kitchen.
For fruit juices she poured boiling water into mason jars with wild raspberries and honey to make raspberry juice, called “shrub” by the Nearings, and the same for rose hips from our hedge, their orange fruits floating like lobster buoys at the top of the jar. Come cold and flu season, the jars of raspberries and rose hips were worth more than gold for their vitamin C content.
Helen was known to have a soft spot for exotics like avocados, bananas, and Florida oranges, which she had shipped to Maine, but as they didn’t support the self-sufficiency stance, these were conveniently not mentioned in their books. When we could afford it, we’d go in on an order of those Temple oranges from Vero Beach, and if there was enough money, a case of peaches to boil and store in mason jars as well. By first snow, the apples, brassicas, and root vegetables in the root cellar were surrounded by shelves lined with as many as four hundred colorful jars of preserved vegetables and fruits.
“Those peaches are as bright as summer sunshine when I shine my flashlight into the dark root cellar on a cold day,” Mama told Helen. “And the oranges look like jewels from some exotic land.”
If he needed a hit of vitamin C, Papa would climb down into the cellar under the kitchen, unscrew a mason