The Persimmon Tree

 

I found a persimmon tree today.  I had no idea it was there – pretty close to my road, although in a place I’m not sure I can get to because it’s steep and full of bushes and probably briars.  My mama, when she was still about my age now, would have managed but she was a tougher person than I am.  At my age she was still climbing barb wire fences and wading through brambles to pick wild blackberries.  I guess it helped that she was small and wiry where I am fat and clumsy.  We will see.  Mama used to make persimmon cake and I think I still know where the recipe is.  Another important use for persimmons is weather forecasting.  If you break open the seed, it will tell you what kind of winter it will be.  A spoon shape means a lot of snow and a knife means a sharp, cold winter.  I don't know how reliable it is, but probably about as reliable as anything else. 

I was out on the RTV, giving the dogs a good run.  After seeing these persimmons in a totally unlikely place, I decided to ride around my horse pasture to see if by chance there was another tree along the fence line, where gathering would be easier.  While I was at it, I would check to see if the crows have left any pecans and how the walnuts are doing.  I picked up a grand total of four pecans and found maybe a dozen half eaten by the crows and several which fell prematurely, still in the green hull.  There were no pecans last year and no walnuts.  The trees in my backyard that usually bomb the yard with nuts were bare. 

There are a lot of walnuts this year, already littering the ground and hitting the tin roof of the garage.  The dogs think we are under attack when they hear them and rush out to bark at the invisible shooters.  They have tried to play with the walnuts but apparently don’t like the taste of the hulls.  I’m grateful for that; otherwise, they would have my living room littered with them too.  They brought in and tried to eat a crabapple back in the early summer,  and were sorely disappointed in the taste of it.  I watched Joey and Jace roll it back and forth on the floor, seeming to say, “you eat it … no, you do it.”  When I picked it up, I saw that they had chewed on it a little, but only a little.  Crabapples are not in their diet.

We used to look forward to picking up walnuts in the fall.  At one time, we could sell them by the pound, and we filled up hundreds of sacks from the trees all over the farm.  Daddy would haul them to the Co-op where they hulled them and gave us a check.  Of course we didn’t sell all of them – we kept plenty to crack and use for fudge and pies.  Mama used to make a walnut pie, made just like a pecan pie but with walnuts.  It was even better than pecan!  I think she said her mother used to make a good walnut cake, but she somehow lost the recipe.

We hulled the walnuts by pouring them out in the lane that led to the barn and letting the trucks and tractors run over them for a few days.  Then we picked up the nuts and let them dry.  We cracked them with a rock on top of the old cistern in the back yard and brought them inside to pick out while we watched television or sat in the porch swing. 

The pecan trees came from Arkansas.  My great grandmother’s brother lived there and they brought them one year and planted them in the orchard.  I was just a little girl when they got big enough to bear anything, and now others have sprung up around the house, along the garden fence and even at the edge of the front yard.  If you can keep the crows from stealing them, they are easier to shell than walnuts.

Sometimes we would luck out and find a hickory tree with nuts on the ground.  Hickory nuts are even tastier than walnuts and make a killer fudge.  But if there's anything on earth harder than a hickory nut shell, I don't know what it is.  My mama was a natural born forager and would make Daddy or me stop anywhere in the world if she saw something edible along the road.  We once found a bed of morel mushrooms beside a trail in a national park and she gathered them  up while I worried about spending the night in jail for theft.  It would probably have been worth it if they had let us keep the morels but I bet they would have taken them for themselves.  Luckily we escaped detection and got rid of the evidence by eating them for supper.

The orchard, other than the pecan trees, has played out years ago, but when I was a little girl, it was still providing plenty of apples, cherries, pears and peaches.  In my great-great grandfather’s ledgers, I found an entry where he received a batch of apple trees to plant, about the time he was building this house. 

I suppose those were the same trees I remember.  They had names like Seek No Further, Kinards Choice, Harvest and Red June.  I remember the apples that the family called June apples. Some of the apples were “cooking apples” and some were “eating apples.”  There was one tree I remember on the west end of the orchard that had the best apples to eat but I don’t know which variety it was.  I just know it was a speckled red and green apple that was tart and crisp. I talked to Alice, who grew up on the next farm and spent a lot of time here, about the apples and she got a dreamy look on her face when she remembered the apples.  Her daughter Annie, who practically grew up on this farm being babysat by my mama, didn't remember apple trees but she did talk about getting scolded for eating too many of the cherries that still grew on a tree in the yard.

 My great-great Grandfather died in 1888.  I hope he lived long enough to sample some of the apples.  Especially that one tree on the far West end of the orchard.

 

Still Hanging On

 

A few weeks ago, I wrote about a pair of walnuts that were still hanging on to a high branch on a tree outside my window.  Shortly afterward, one walnut fell.  Today, weeks later, that one lonely walnut is still clinging to the branch.  It’s a sad sight to me, for some reason.  If I could reach it, I might be tempted to knock it down and get it over with.

I know people like that walnut, clinging desperately to old ways and old ideas, and I have the same compulsion sometimes to give them a whack, perhaps knocking some of their old ideas out of them.

The community my family settled in and has lived in for almost 200 years was fortunate enough to be offered electricity in the 1920s, almost two decades before Rural Electrification brought that modern convenience to the rest of this county.  Knowing what I know about my great-grandfather, I’m sure he was one of the first to sign up.  He was a progressive man.

 Most of the other neighbors in our little bend of the river also were glad to get what must have seemed like a miracle.  But two farms adjoining our property were left out.  Their owners were afraid of the electric lines that would have to cross their land.  I’m not sure exactly what they were afraid of, but it may have been fear that somehow electricity would leak out of the lines and kill them or their livestock. 

Anyway, for whatever reason, the power company had to run the lines a different way to avoid their property.  They totally bypassed the first mile of road frontage and built the lines across my great-uncle’s farm, down the road to the next three farms and an offshoot down our road.  So, even now, the power lines run in a slightly weird way, through the woods and across a big open pasture instead of along the road.

Of course, as anyone could have predicted, when the other farmers in the neighborhood had electricity for a while, the two fearful neighbors noticed it didn’t kill anyone, so they wanted it too.  I suspect their wives may have had something to do with it, after they saw the modern new kitchens with electric refrigerators and stoves and lights that didn’t smoke up the curtains and smell up the room.  So, the power company came back at some point and ran lines off the poles that went to our place, across the holler that runs from the main road to the river bottom, and delivered electricity to those two farms.  Those lines stand as a testament today to men who hung on, like my walnut, to old ways.   And every time I hear someone bemoan modern life and talk about the “good old days” so longingly, I think about those two farmers who, if they had their way, would have been stuck in the good old days with oil lamps and no refrigeration.  Even worse, no air conditioning and no electric blankets.

Sometimes the old ways do turn out to be the best.  Take walnuts, like the one that is clinging so desperately to the tree.  For decades, we have cracked walnuts on the top of our old cistern, using a rock.  It does tend to smash the nuts along with the shells and it occasionally causes a smashed finger for the careless rock wielder.   

But as a simple, low-tech method, it works well.  Once, several years ago, someone gave my mama a nutcracker that was supposed to let you bust open even the hardest nuts with a simple turn of the handle.  As I recall, it was a contraption sort of like a vise grip mounted on a piece of wood, with a metal handle.  I was eager to try it, having suffered several smashed fingers from the old way.  Mama was skeptical.  Turns out, she was right.  For one thing, it was a two-person job – one to hold down the wood part and the other to try to turn the handle.  Almost immediately, the metal part broke away from the wood part.  It was back to the rock on the cistern top, which I still use to this day. 

  I think the nutcracker dimmed my faith in modern technology.  I look through the catalogs with a skeptical eye now at the new, improved gadgets guaranteed to make even the simplest tasks easier and quicker.  Did you know that you can buy a deluxe kit for roasting hot dogs and marshmallows for the low price of $79.95?  A metal stick with interchangeable tips in a special carrying case?  It’s even dishwasher safe.  We have always used a stick.  Simple and disposable and you don’t need the carrying case.  Maybe I should start selling a super deluxe kit which includes several sticks in a sack.  I could sell it for $59.95 and label it as an organic, environmentally friendly marshmallow roasting kit.  I could even give people a choice in the kind of sticks - maple, oak, walnut, or elm.  The dogs love to collect sticks.  I could make a fortune.

Afterword: We had a bunch of tornadoes and thunderstorms over the weekend, after I had written this.  The storm was too much for the lone walnut and it was on the ground when I got up the next morning.  Sometimes it takes a storm to force us to let go.  That’s a philosophical discussion for another day.