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.

 

Sleeping with the Window Open

 

I have always wanted a sleeping porch. I used to love going camping, sleeping by the creek in a tent, with the water rippling by and listening to soft splashes of the fish and frogs and other night creatures.  That was pretty close to a sleeping porch, but now the best I can do is sleep with the windows open. 

My bedroom has three big old-fashioned windows.  I have to wrestle the old double hung windows up, holding my breath that I won’t break one of the irreplaceable bubble paned glasses.  The sash weights on these windows are long gone, so I have to prop them up with a stick, and most of the storm windows are not in the best condition either.  But it’s worth it to me to lie in bed listening to the far-off calls of the hoot owls, the tree frogs and even the slightly annoying cicadas on summer nights.  I can almost tell the seasons by the night sounds from my windows – spring peepers, katydids, and the song of the wild geese in the fall.  Then there are the rainy nights – too few of them lately, but the rumbles of thunder in the distance bring hope of a shower with the dance of raindrops on my tin roof and the clean scent of the rain on the breeze.  Some of the best times are the early morning rains, just about sunrise.  One window faces slightly southwest and that is where most of our rain comes from.  If I’m awake and there is enough light, I can see the showers moving across the pastures coming toward the house.

Scout likes to sleep under the open window too, when he is not sleeping on top of the air conditioning vent.  Every now and then he will sit up and look out the window, making sure nothing is creeping up through the yard to attack us.  With seven dogs in the house right now, nothing much can ever creep up, but one never knows and a collie has to stay vigilant.  His young sons, still waiting for their forever families to find them, follow his example and I’ve noticed that often times he lets them run first out of the house to bark at night creatures, only following if he thinks it’s a serious incursion.  

I remember as a child hearing a distant train whistle in the night – trains have not run through our county in several years now.  And I remember lying on that same bed in that same room with my grandmother, who I called Nanny, for naps in the afternoon.  I’m not sure how much napping we did – I was probably talking most of the time and telling stories I used to make up.  But I have great memories of the breezes that came through the window in the afternoon as we lay there.  It was a precious, simpler time, when dreams were still a possibility and I had my whole life ahead of me. Maybe that’s why I still love sleeping with the windows open.

Joey

 

He was the tiniest of all of Sophie’s puppies.  In a litter of ten, a runt could be expected, but Joey just didn’t seem to grow much at all, in spite of supplemental feedings from a bottle.  I had a bad feeling about the little tri-color boy, although he seemed lively and perfectly able to fight his way through the crowd for a turn at his mom’s table.  As I watched his miniscule paws push against the rim of the baby bottle when I fed him, I tried to tell myself that he was just small, but doubt crept in as the other nine seemed to grow overnight.

Then Monroe came to visit.  She had been asking for weeks when the puppies would be born and she was eager to see them.  Monroe has been a favorite of Sophie since she was a baby and she loves puppies.  So, one Saturday morning, I got a call from Annie, Monroe’s mom, that they wanted to come visit the puppies. 

The first thing Monroe did was climb into the wading pool that doubles as a whelping box and sit down with Sophie and her family.  The next thing she did was hone in on Joey.  Before I knew it, she had him in her lap.  Shortly after that, she was on the living room sofa with the tiny puppy cradled in her arms, talking to him as if he were her best friend. 

From then on, Monroe kept up with Joey and his progress.  Every Sunday morning before church, she asked “How is Joey?”  And about every couple of weeks, she and her mom showed up to check on her favorite puppy.  She spent most of her visit carrying Joey around the house, sitting with him in the swing, or wrapping him in a blanket and pulling him in a little wagon.  It was astonishing how he just lay there.  In the back of my mind, I still worried about his size – he was only about half the size of his littermates.  But at his six-week visit to the vet, he and his siblings got a clean bill of health.  “I knew he would be okay,” said Monroe.  And I expect she did. Sometimes it just takes a little extra love from a special little person.  He didn't let his size bother him, wrestling with his brothers and sisters, pushing his way in to the feeding pans and figuring out that if the steps were a little too high, he could go around to the ramp at the end of the porch!  

As the puppies grew, Annie said she tried to warn Monroe that I might find a new home for Joey.  “No,” Monroe said, “Mary Beth won’t do that.”  What could I do?  I think that sometime during those bottle feedings and those trips through the house in that little wagon, the decision was made that Joey would be staying.  The last thing I needed was another dog, but what can you do when one steals your heart?  Monroe’s grandmother, my cousin Alice, accused me of grooming Monroe to want to take Joey home with her.  I would have done that if I thought it would work, but the family already had two dogs and a new baby on the way later in the summer.  So, I will just have to share Joey with Monroe at my house.

Suddenly, it seemed, Joey was no longer a tiny puppy.  In fact, he eventually caught up with his littermates and became quite the handsome young dog, with one tipped ear and one upright. I expect he will be a handsome and dignified adult.

  He has developed his own personality and learned to jump up on the bed, a trick his dad and older sister have never mastered.  I think he was astonished the first time he did it – he sat there and looked around like he didn’t understand how he got there. He loves to lick my face and was the first to learn to sit for a treat. He sleeps upside down, still likes to crawl into my lap and has discovered a secret way from the back yard into the front yard.  I can close the gate and he beats me back into the house.  I need to get Monroe to come out here again.  Maybe he will tell her how he does it.