Spring | Summer | Fall | Winter

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Cherries, berries, peaches, apples and pears got canned in their turns. Daddy picked the cherries. We got the seeder out and fastened it on a table on the back porch. The Ball book told us how to can the cherries by cold pack, hot pack or open kettle method. Open kettle was easiest: measure the seeded fruit, add sugar, heat to boiling, boil fifteen minutes, pour in hot jars and seal.

Mama and Aunt Merica picked berries, with Joe and me tagging along. When the time came for the dewberries and the blackberries to ripen, Mama called Miss Cynthia. The Phillipi farm lapped around two sides of us, and back behind the woods was a pasture with lots of berry vines growing along the top of the ridge near the edge of the woods. It was far from Miss Cynthia's house, so she picked in fields closer to her home. Every year Mama called her, and every year Miss Cynthia said, "Why, of course, you can pick all you want. Go over on the other ridge if you want to. Help yourself."

Berry picking was a great adventure. You walked along old logging roads, up hardly discernable paths, seeing plants Aunt Merica knew but which didn't grow in our garden, watching out for snakes and warding off bees of various kinds I had my little bucket to fill, but once at the patch I began by eating. The tall blackberry vines scratched my hands and arms, the ground-hugging vines of the dewberries got my feet and ankles. They grabbed at Mama and Aunt Merica, too. We disregarded the blood the briers drew and spent the morning choosing the fattest and the blackest berries from these wild vines.

Sometimes we went to Aunt Lillie's to pick. That was more fun for all of us. Mama and Aunt Merica and Aunt Lillie never stopped talking. Joe and the cousins and I played. In the woods was a grapevine that looped across from where it grew on the steep wooded bank to a tall tree up which it wound its way. The loop made a great swing and we wore the soft woods' earth down to brown dust dragging our bare feet back and forth.

For Mama and Aunt Merica it was hot, tiring work; they came in weary but proud of their several gallons of berries. Only once was Mother outraged: that was the day we were walking back from Aunt Lillie's, along the dusty road, carrying our morning's picking. A car we didn't know drew up beside us and a city man leaned out and asked to buy our berries. "The very idea!" Mama reported to Daddy that night. "Thinking we were some kind of trash out picking for money!"

After the half gallon and quart cans of berries that Mama and Aunt Merica decided they needed were canned, they then began making jelly and jam. Our table had one or more sweet at each of the meals; a glass of jelly, a pretty dish of jam, a compote of marmalade, a stand of conserves. The Ball book made clear to us which fruits could be used for each. We didn't make everything they suggested, just gooseberry, ground cherry, grape, peach and rhubarb conserves; apple, blackberry, dewberry, grape, peach, and quince jelly; dewberry, blackberry, and raspberry jam; grape, peach, and quince marmalade, and quince honey (my very favorite of all). Aunt Merica made most of these, straining the juice for jelly through a heavy old pillowcase hanging over and dripping into a big pan in the cellar, then boiling the juice in a flat dishpan kept for this very purpose. By spoonfuls she tested and tested until the jams were thick enough, the jelly jelled. We began the winter with several dozen glasses of jelly and a comparable number of pints of jams, conserves and marmalade.

Sometimes Aunt Merica and I would go up in the woods to pick huckleberries. The bushes were scarcely eighteen inches off the ground, so she would sit down to pick. We would have huckleberry pie for supper and next day can a few quarts for winter.

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