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.