Spring | Summer | Fall | Winter

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Peaches were the big event. A truck from North Carolina would stop at the spring below the house and from it Mama would buy three bushels. Or Daddy got them from a truck that stopped in the square in town. Always we got three bushels. Joe and I would eat and eat, selecting the prettiest and the ripest from the baskets, eating out in the yard, lining up our seeds in separate places on the stone wall back of the cistern so as to know he didn't get more than I or I more than he. Sometimes the peaches were peeled, the peeling saved to make jelly. Sometimes the fruit was dipped in hot water as with tomatoes, and the skins slipped off. Either way, the fruit was halved, the pit removed and the peaches packed, two or three halves, cavity side down around the bottom of the jar, followed by other overlapping layers until the jar was filled within an inch of the top, the fruit covered with boiling syrup and processed in hot-water bath for 20 to 30 minutes.

Each bushel made 18 to 24 quarts, so by the end of canning (which might mean two or three days) we were sure to have 50 or 60 quarts ready for winter. Peach pie was a favorite supper dessert and on days when snow fell all day long, Daddy would say, "Let’s have family pie" and Mother would know to make a deep, rectangular peach pie for supper, and that, covered with cream, is all we would have.

The gooseberries grew along the garden fence, out by the pig pen, between the asparagus bed and the rhubarb. Rhubarb made the early pies but by the time the gooseberries were getting their rosy sides, the rhubarb was considered too old to use. Mama picked the gooseberries while they were still green and then used up quantities of sugar trying to get the pies so Daddy would not cringe when he took the first bite. Everything else got picked when it was fully ripe. Gooseberries seemed a little foreign to Mama and when someone said they should be picked green, that was what was done.

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