Trick or Treat

 

Trick or treat arrived today, and I don’t know what treat we failed to provide, but Mother Nature was not amused and tricked us with a killing frost.  I noticed this when I was outside at 4:00 a.m., under a waning moon, imploring six puppies to go potty.  Quickly.  It was their first experience with frosted grass and their first time to spend the night in the house since they began toddling around on their own and were moved to the outside pen. 

It was twenty-four hours of firsts for Susie, Sally, Sedric, Scotty, Sirius and Sam.  They had their first ride in the truck, their first visit to the vet and their first time in front of a fire.  Since they had been using the empty fireplace as a playground and napping spot, I was a little concerned that they might catch themselves on fire, but they seem to understand that they can’t get closer than the hearth, which is a fine place to sleep. 

I was dreading the vet trip because at least a couple will inevitably throw up on the way, but miraculously, no one did.  They protested loudly about their confinement in the crate for the first few miles, but soon fell asleep.  All but Scotty, whose puppy screams bounced all over the cab of the truck and continued in the waiting room until I took him out and held him in my lap.  Other than that, their visit went easily, and all were pronounced healthy and well-behaved. Sedric weighed a whopping eight pounds nine ounces while Sally weighed only five pounds nine ounces, with the other four falling midway between the two.  Everyone fell asleep on the way home, and I would have too, if I didn’t have to drive.  Hauling two dog crates full of puppies takes a lot out of you!

Last night, the puppies kept the dog door flapping until bedtime.  The colder temps did not seem to discourage their forays into the yard, and I made more trips outside to round them up than I wanted to, but at bedtime they settled down in the crate and peace descended.  The peace lasted until 4:00, when I started to hear activity and whining.  Outside we went, into a cold, silent moonlit night with stars spread across the sky like tiny spotlights.  The quiet filled the shadows; the only sound being the rustle of leaves under puppy feet.

And tonight is Halloween night, when the quiet cold will echo with the shouts and laughter of children, dressed as their favorite characters, flitting from house to house with cries of “trick or treat!”  Hopefully, their costumes will allow room for extra bundling to fend off the wind chill and there will be plenty of candy to reward their perseverance.  The neighborhoods in town will be festive, with just enough spooky to make the night memorable.  My collie babies will collect extra treats without going door to door, although I did experiment with tiny bat wings on two puppies.  They were not impressed at all.  Sally lay down and refused to get back up and Sam kept pulling at the elastic and growling.  At the Halloween parade this past weekend, I saw several cute dogs in costume.  These puppies are cute enough in their regular fur coats and they will be happy to nap by the fire.  Napping by the fire sounds like a pretty good plan.  I might join them.

 

Sophie's Secret

 

Somewhere my daddy and granddaddy must be just shaking their heads and laughing.  I was raised on a farm and therefore understood the birds and bee and calves and piglets from an early age.  Apparently I didn’t learn as much about puppies as I thought I did, because I was surprised by a litter of puppies last month that I had no idea were expected.

Sophie should be in the intelligence business – she could be an undercover agent.  I had no idea she was having puppies, and I still am mystified at how she and Scout managed to get together, with her in the pen and he outside the pen.  But anyway, I now have six beautiful collie puppies, an unexpected blessing.

I knew Sophie was acting strangely that Friday night – she was whining and restless and got in bed with me and wouldn’t move over.  All afternoon she had been acting like Lassie when Timmy was in the well, so much so that I actually thought something might be wrong with somebody around the house.  She finally settled down, however, and I went to sleep.  About daylight I woke up and the first thing I noticed was that Sophie was not on the bed and I could hear what sounded just like baby puppies coming from somewhere in the house.  I won’t repeat what I said, but it did propel me out of bed and into the living room where Sophie was busy licking off what turned out to be the third in a series of puppies, right there in the living room floor.

My first response was astonishment; my next response was to go in search of the kiddie swimming pool that serves as a delivery room/nursery for puppies.  It was, of course, in the most inconvenient place it could be – the very back of a very crowded woodshed that now serves as a repository for seldom used items that are too big to store anywhere else.  There I was, still in my nightshirt and slippers crawling over an assortment of bulky junk, dragging out the pool and wrestling it into my bedroom, searching the house for some newspapers and persuading Sophie that this was a better place for puppies than the floor.  By the time everyone was settled, number five made his appearance and the first four were lining up for their first breakfast, making the noise that only hungry puppies can make.  I sat back to marvel at the sight and try to convince myself that I was not a total idiot – Sophie was just too good at keeping secrets.

So now I have the joy of watching six fat collie babies grow up and find new families to love.  I always forget how fast that happens.  It seems like no time passed before tiny unfocused eyes peered at me during morning checkups.  Then, in the blink of an eye, six furry faces peeked over the top of the swimming pool at me when I woke in the mornings.  Then there was the day that, first one, then all six found out that they could pull themselves over that rim and explore the wide-open spaces of the house.  They even found the dog door and learned that it led to an even bigger world to explore.   

For obvious reasons, their exploration of the house had to be curtailed, and life outside was introduced.  Out came the big puppy pen, the doghouse and a new bag of cedar shavings.  Thankfully, the weather has been mild for mid-October and the puppies can enjoy the sunshine during the day and sleep under a heat bulb at night.  From the beginning, they have had no fear of the unknown and an insatiable desire for exploration.  One day last week, I looked up from my seat on the porch swing and saw two fat puppy butts descending from the yard steps into the great beyond.  I retrieved puppies, secured the gate and watched as they chased falling leaves and burrowed into the jungle of late blooming four-o-clocks that surround my porch.  Yesterday, three tried to follow mom up the road, making it to the mailbox before I could catch them.  Any day now, I just know they are going to follow Daddy out to the fields for his patrols, if I am not diligent in my supervision.  He loves to baby sit, now that Sophie is willing to let him help.

They have cultivated a way of scattering in all directions when set free from the pen, and there always seems to be one missing when I count noses.  Six surprise puppies from Sophie and Scout naturally called for six “s” names and so I have Sally, Susie, Scotty, Sedric, Sirius, and Sam, named in honor of my long-ago tri-color dog who will always live in my heart.  Sam was the first to figure out the dog door, and he seems determined to be a house dog instead of a farm dog.

It's an adventure that will be over all too soon.  Already a couple have new homes waiting in about three weeks.  I spend way too much time sitting on the porch, snuggling and enjoying puppy kisses, when I should be cleaning my house and pulling weeds from the flower beds.  Those things can wait.  I have puppies to love.

Something Came Over Me

 

It must be the ghosts of my grandmothers and great-grandmothers that nudge me into things that I should not even think about doing.  Somewhere they are sitting around in their easy chairs, saying to each other, “Want to see something funny?  Let’s convince her to do this!”

It was the muscadines that started it.  A friend had a bumper crop of the tart, aromatic fruits of the fall, and I was a lucky recipient of part of the bounty.  I ate several, squeezing the skin to get the juice out and then popping the inner fruit into my mouth and spitting out the seeds.  (There is an exact method to the eating of the muscadine.)  But as I enjoyed them, something came over me. There were too many to eat.  Maybe I could make jelly.

In my almost 70 years, I have never made jelly.  I have helped my mom with jelly a few times, but I had only a vague notion of the process.  I knew it involved sterilizing jars and lids and boiling the jars of jelly in a big pot of water.  Big pots of boiling water have always intimidated me, but something came over me last Friday and I started looking at Pinterest for instructions on making muscadine jelly. Pinterest is one of the most dangerous places on the internet.  More disasters have occurred as a result of viewing its cheerful pages than can be counted.  There should be a warning at the top of the page for people like me.

I found recipes with headings like “Real Southern Muscadine Jelly,” or “Simplest Muscadine Jelly,” or “Easy 3 Ingredient Muscadine Jelly.”  I have found over the years that my expectations of simple and easy do not always line up with other peoples’ idea of simple and easy.  I was perplexed at directions that mentioned hot water baths and inversion methods and jelly bags.  There were recipes that seemed to leave out details like the proportion of sugar and juice, or exactly how long to cook the mixture and how to tell when it becomes jelly.  I got sidetracked reading about the inversion method because a lively argument took place in the comments about that method, with several people giving dire warnings of botulism and potential death and the author of the recipe insisting that her mother and grandmother taught her to make jelly, everyone in her family from the beginning of time had made it that way, and no one had died yet.  The jelly bag was another mystery.  It said to take cheesecloth, gather the cooked fruit into a bag and hang it over the pot, letting the liquid drip into the container.  What do you hang it from and where can you even find cheesecloth now?

I got out Mama’s big stock pot and my biggest cooking pot and put the washed fruit in the pot, covered it with water and turned on the stove eye.  I had to search for the potato masher, which was the suggested implement for mashing the juice out of the fruit.  So far, so good.  The aroma of the fruit filled the house and I had thoughts of hot biscuits on winter mornings with jelly made by my own hands. 

The first inkling that I might not quite be as prepared as I should be came when I started looking for small jars.  I managed to scrounge up what I thought might be enough jars, then realized I had no lids.  A trip to town was necessary – surely the Dollar General still had jar lids.  They didn’t.  But I needed a few other things and decided I might as well pick them up while I was there.  Twenty dollars later, I left for another store.  I found the lids there, along with thirty more dollars’ worth of stuff.  Chicken breast was on sale and I felt the need for donuts.  Okay, this jelly was going to be more expensive than I anticipated.  But the muscadines were free so there was that.

An hour later, I had used every pan in my kitchen, several different strainers and I had three containers boiling on the stove. 

I was rapidly running out of counter space and was feeling the beginning of panic.  The instructions said to put the jelly in the sterilized jars immediately and cover with the sterilized lids.  I had no idea how critical it was to do this immediately or how much time immediately meant.  The recipe seemed to include an incredible amount of sugar and was a little vague on the length of cooking time.  There was some kind of complicated process for using a spoon to dip out some of the liquid and deduce whether it was done by what it did on the spoon.  I could have used some help from my ancestors at this point.  They were too busy laughing to oblige.

I got the jelly in the jars, lids on and rings screwed on the top.  Now another dilemma arose.  How to get the jars in the pot of boiling water without burning myself or breaking the jars.  It didn’t occur to me until much later that I could have put the jars in while the water was still cool and just bring the whole thing to a boil.  Those first jars were wrought with danger, until I figured out that I could hold them on the top with my tongs and slide a ladle under the bottom.  Easier said than done, and one jar slipped and turned upside down in the water.  I don’t know if that mattered or not but by then I didn’t really care.  I was so busy worrying about getting the jars situated that I forgot to look at the clock, so I had to guess when fifteen minutes had passed. 

I fished the jars out, set them on the counter and looked around at the mess I had made.  I thought things were going okay when I started hearing the little pops that meant the jars were sealing.  That was about the extent of my knowledge of canning food.  When they had cooled a little, I moved them to the dining room table.  The jelly was beautiful, a clear light purple.  It just seemed to be more like syrup than jelly.  Surely it should be a little thicker than this.  Two hours later, the kitchen was still a mess, and I still had syrup.

 I had been at this now for two days with eight little jars of syrup to show for it. And I had a whole bunch more juice left in the refrigerator.  I did some research and found that you could open all the jars, pour the stuff back in the pot, add more pectin, and cook it longer, repeating the sterilizing of jars and boiling of the filled jars.

Sunday after lunch, I went back to the store and bought more jars, lids, pectin, a better set of tongs, and a pot of mums.  Twenty-five more dollars went out of my bank account. I was not going to let this thing beat me.  It was now day three of this project, and I was convinced that the price of jelly, which I always thought was outrageous, was a bargain and I would never complain about it again.  Those people who make jelly deserve every penny they charge.  I figure mine cost me at least $15 a jar.

I decided to start fresh with the extra juice in the refrigerator and decide what to do about the eight jars of syrup later.  I mixed the juice and an obscene amount of sugar in my big pot, sterilized my new jars and lids, and added twice as much pectin as my recipe called for.  When it seemed the juice was beginning to thicken, I poured it into the jars and put them in the stock pot.  This time I waited until the jars were inside before bringing the water to a boil and I remembered to look at the clock.  When I removed the jars, they immediately started sealing and I took that as a good omen.  I decided to tackle yesterday’s syrup, so I emptied it into my pot, added another box of pectin with reckless abandon and sterilized the empty jars. 

Another hour later, and I was amazed to see that today’s new batch was beginning to thicken a little.  After supper, I looked again and all fourteen little jars had JELLY in them!  Real, honest to goodness muscadine jelly! 

In my quest for jelly recipes, I ran across a recipe for muscadine cake that sounds good.  I still have just about as much juice as it calls for.  Tomorrow I will go to the store again for the ingredients I don’t have and try to find my bundt pan.  At least I am familiar with the process of making a cake and it doesn’t involved pots of boiling water.

Whatever the fever was that caused me to decide to make jelly at this point in my life, I believe it has passed.  I hope my ancestors are satisfied and have had their laugh.  Next time they decide to inspire me to do something uncharacteristic, I hope they will pick something easier, like maybe chopping firewood or butchering a hog.