Spring
| Summer | Fall |
Winter
Fall
Fall was in the air when the grapes were picked.
Mama canned some for pies. Daddy made the grape juice. Aunt
Merica made pink jelly, white jelly, purple jelly. I ate. Right
after school, I would go to the shed and hunt for the deepest
purple clusters on the vine that ran around its three sides.
Sometimes I found deep pink ones on the vine out by the path
to the pig pen, there beside the flower bed with baby's breath
and blue forget-me-not. But it was the white grape vine out
in the perennial flower bed above the kitchen that could give
me the best grape of all.
All the while I was out investigating the grape
crop, Mama was in the kitchen or on the kitchen parch, busy,
or pretending to be busy, but within earshot of my wanderings.
On school days, she got us ready, saw to it we had the lunch
she had packed and that all the books and pencils were in our
book bags. Then she walked us out the road to meet the neighbor's
car in good weather or the buggy in bad, for our ride to school.
She sat by the window in the afternoon, waiting to see the buggy
slowly making its way up toward Aunt Lillie's, waiting for us
to come around the turn toward our house. She found work to
do in the garden when I made my trips to the orchard to find
the first fallen fruit. Mama kept us on a long leash.
My preferred apple these bright fall days was
the Red Delicious found, freshly fallen, under the tree, lying
on top of rotting apples and under a cloud of busy yellow jackets.
As the trees in the orchard ripened, Daddy picked and brought
them to the cellar to pour into the bins. All late summer and
fall Mama had picked up favorite applesauce and pie apples to
use for the weekly meals. Now that Daddy was bringing them in,
she got out the apple peeler and all the canning equipment and
made ready to can those apples that did not store well. I liked
to push the round apples onto the iron spike, turn the wheel
and watch the coil of peel wind off and drop into the container
on the floor below. The apples were cut in snits, ready for
pies. The peel and cores were used for jelly. Sometimes we went
to Aunt Lillie's the day they picked the orchard and helped
fill the wagon which the two black horses pulled back to the
house with some of us sitting on top the apples. Daddy came
with the car and we took home varieties we did not have in our
orchard.
By the time winter came and I was sent to the
cellar to bring down the basket of apples and pears for eating
after dinner, I could choose from among Virginia Beauty, Pippin,
Smokehouse, Northern Spy, Russet, Stayman, Red and Yellow Delicious,
Wines, Pigpen, York, Rhone. Some of these I knew to leave, for
they were better cooked; Transparents were long since gone,
being a summer apple. The pears, which had been brought in and
piled beside the milk bench, there by the cellar, were canned
and made into marmalade. A few were stored in the cellar, but
since they did not keep well there was only one small bin.
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