Farm Life Tiny Book

Farm Life Essays No. 001

Cherry Pie

Farm Life Essays No. 001 WR ITTE N & ILLU STRATED

BY L ORIL EE RAG ER

Cherry Pie H AN DMA DE F OR FAMILY U SE.

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While I was reading Hannah Coulter by Wendell Berry, I was reminded of the life my grandmother often spoke of growing up in our rural community with family and farmhands living together as one. Helping one another work in each other’s crops, repair farmhouses, and in the mix like the novel, how loved ones came and went with the war. This is just as my grandmother would tell in our interview about her own brothers leaving for the war. In our Kentucky rural community, the homeplace farms were known as names such as ‘The Austin Place,’ and the “Old Cane Farm.” These were the names of original farm owners that had long passed before me and had new folks living there, yet the old farm names stuck with them as a sweet tribute to the past and respect the people that worked the land. It was such a close

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community that we lived in growing up I didn’t know until I was in high school if anyone was really related by blood. I didn’t know if they really were an uncle or cousin because we all worked, ate and churched together like one big close family.

When I was in about the 5th grade I remember really feeling quite important in my role as the baby of the family and the youngest granddaughter of 11 grandchildren. I often was left with my Grandma Smith for the summers before I was big enough to drive a tractor. She was very busy with her large garden, feeding the farm hands lunch daily, and her many Methodist church bake sales. Not to mention being in charge of bible school snacks, and canning and preserving the garden’s goodies when they did ‘come in’ – even if you were sick of squash they were ‘in’ so we had to eat lots of them, can even more of them, and deliver the extra to neighbors.

These days were some of the grandest of my childhood with my Grandma Smith. She would tell me stories of how she grew up with all 9 children of the Bellar clan. How each one of

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them had very specific roles and chores. Ivy was in charge of firewood for warmth and cooking and repairing the chicken coops, while Elvis was in charge of hoeing tobacco and bringing in the garden vegetables. Lucille was in charge of washing clothes, and little Louise was so small she would hand grandma, her sister, the vegetables to be cooked up for canning and for supper. That is until the war took away her brothers in 1941 she said, “We all just did the best we could back then to survive.”

Grandma likes to tell it as if she was up in her twenties at the time, but in all reality, she was just 10 years old and stood on a washtub to reach the stove. That’s how old I was when I remember first hearing the story, and not even knowing at that age myself how to turn on an oven. At that age, she was in charge of cooking for the whole family. I remember being amazed at the stories she would tell about the important roles in the family.

She grew up in hard times but didn’t even know she was living hard she went on to explain. They had all the homegrown food they could eat and then some, and with brothers and

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sisters they certainly had a crew to pitch in on the farm and help one another. Let’s see, she says as she recalls, “there’s me (Betty Sue), Lucille, Ivy, Elvis, Felix, Johnny, Thomas, Ruby Mae, and Louise. We all just helped Mama and Daddy every day until all the work was done.”

She went on to tell that they even made sandwiches and sold them to the soldiers who were on the trains in town. She said the trains brought men from all over the country headed to war and sometimes the tracks would be backed up for hours and “them boys were hungry.”

The best part of the research and gathering I’ve been doing, as I collect data on our family farm, has by far been gathering memories. One of the photos I’ve found is a rare photo of her with her siblings, parents and a few nephews. My grandma, Betty Sue is pictured front row far left. Sweet sister Lucy is back row center, just on the left of Uncle Felix the sailor.

“Lucy was my very best friend,” my grandma always has said. Aunt Lucille was with her every summer I can remember while canning the garden goodness as it came in.

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Aunt Lucille was her sidekick for many years putting up pepper relish, green tomato ketchup, pickles, jams and preserves. She was also always along for our many trips we would take with all of the grandkids to Opryland, USA – a big theme park dedicated to the Grand Ole Opry and Country music in Nashville, Tn. We were allowed to skip church on Sunday, which was a big deal for my Church of Christ father to allow, and be there right when the park would open. This is where we met the likes of big-time celebrities like Porter Wager, Roy Acuff, and Little Jimmy Dickens. We heard some of the greatest country music, and saw red white and blue dressed square dancers in live shows at the park. The day always ended with Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless The USA” where my Aunt Lucille and grandma proudly stood in the audience with their hands on their hearts and tears running down their faces. Today it is a wonderful memory because Opryland is gone and a large mall is there now. My grandma is the only living child left of the famous Kentucky State Fair winning “Largest Family,” the Bellar family, so gathering these memories will be special for many.

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Reading Wendell Berry: Life and Work has taken me directly back to my place on earth I know as home. Learning about his life in Kentucky, his education, passion for agriculture, being a Christian, and his love of his country has me feeling as if he just might be a distant cousin to the Bellars. He talks of a way of life in 1930 - 1940 that mirrors exactly how my grandmother lived, and how I also lived in 1980.

Just as his characters describe looking through old farm places, I am reminded of the plaster walls, the dusty wood floors and old stoves in the farmhouse I grew up in, known as the Maude Gill Farm.

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My grandmother, just as it reads in Hannah Coulter “has cooked and canned and butchered together…” with so many of her sisters, neighbors, her children, and grandchildren. The community we lived in really did lean on one another in good and bad times. Also, as the family grew, so did the number of children and grandchildren and even great-grandchildren. Even though it’s hard to remember each and every birthday, Hannah goes on to say in the book “she remembers everything else - the history and weaknesses of every one of them, and she knows exactly what to get every one of them on their birthdays and Christmases.”

My grandma remembers each and everyone’s favorite desserts and disliked foods.

So when my birthday comes around she always has a fresh cherry pie with homemade latticed buttered perfectly baked golden crust. Even if I tell her I am on a diet and didn’t need it, I still get the call that I need to come by and pick up my pie while it’s still warm.

My sister Michelle gets fresh apple pie from the local Johnson’s Orchards, sister Mandy

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her chess bars. My son Will gets a lemon pound cake, and Luke gets homemade peach ice cream. She just laughs and laughs about how all my husband wants is a skillet of cornbread. “Is that all babe? Are you sure he don’t like sweets?

I’ll swannee I ain’t never heard of nobody that don’t like sweets, but I’ll make him a skillet of cornbread if that’s what you’re sure he wants?”

She is just making sure he’s not just pulling her leg and not wanting to trouble her about making something else, as a skillet of cornbread is too easy, she thinks, but no matter what she’s gonna bake you your favorite.

These foods made fresh from the gardens and orchards on the farm are really the way we love and have been loved my whole life. We didn’t go to the store to shop for gifts, and we certainly didn’t ask for anything when it came to

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birthdays. We really had all we needed. Any new clothes were for special occasions like Easter Sunday or a funeral and were even handmade.

So our gifts were homemade, hand patted, baked full of goodness and love. No store sold that anywhere I know of.

As I grew up, I no longer could stay at grandmas all day. As I approached 13 years old, I had to go to the field like the men to run tractors. Some days it was pulling a bush hog and some days pulling a planter. We all sat tobacco together, we filled semi-trucks together, and went to grandmas to eat lunch together. So, as I eat my cherry pie every year for my birthday, I’m reminded of so many stories of family and one in particular of picking cherries.

The taste of a fresh cherry hand-picked from the very top of the tree in the orchard by grandma’s house is the sweetest you’ve ever let touch your tongue.

One particular memory was from when I had had a long day on the farm when I was about 15. Even though we were done in the field I knew grandma had asked that I stop by on my way home. She asked to help her just before the

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sun went down because the summer evening became much cooler as the sun set. When I got to grandma’s house she said the cherry’s had come in so we needed to get the pickup and go get all we could reach.

That particular day I had sweat all the way through the back of my white hanes t-shirt and had mud all over my jeans where I had been trying to help fix the irrigation with Uncle David Wayne. Drought and leaking irrigation mean lots of mud and mess in case you didn’t know.

But I knew we needed to get the cherries when grandma said as she knows when they are ripe and ready.

“Of course, the very best cherries are all the way up at the top of the trees,” Grandma says. I realize I was enlisted to be the top of the tree cherry picker. Not because I’m tall, but because I lack fear and common sense. Also, because I’m the youngest and it likely won’t hurt me to fall out of the top of a little o’ cherry tree.

Since I believe and trust my grandma I easily climb up in the back of the pickup truck. Next, I set up the ladder at the end of the tailgate and began to climb.

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She was right, the cherries were simply divine at the top. I had to try just a few before I began putting them in the dishpan. Dark and juicy every single one. They were bursting with flavor and slid right off the stem as easy as could be. Please note, if you are eating cherries right from the tree to be mindful of the pit. As it can crack a tooth if you’re not careful. Be sure to spit those out if they didn’t come off with the stem while you were picking.

It was a successful day cherry-picking and we had a few dishpans full, as well as my belly. So grandma called to us all to come down and get settled in the back of the truck so we could head on up to the house. I was talking non-stop and likely didn’t hear the message to sit down and shut up. I decided I’d hop up and sit on the top of the truck cab and hold on while she eased the truck up from the field. When I did that, she got into the cab of the truck and shut the door, catching my fingers just right at the first knuckles.

The pain wasn’t instant, rather as my hand felt ice cold, until my cousins screamed,

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and she opened the truck door. I fell over, off the top of the truck and onto the tall grass, hitting the ground. Partly laughing, and partly crying, and nauseous, I made sure not to fall into the back of the truck onto the cherries, as I knew I’d be in trouble. I laid there trying to catch my breath in the cool grass. My fingers were fine and so were the cherries that day, thankfully.

The writer Wendell Berry’s voice is so strongly similar to my family stories that I could read him for days. It has helped me remember wonderful stories, times and life on the farm. It also helped me remember the cherry-picking business can be a dangerous job, but if you survive it the reward of grandma’s fresh-baked pie is absolutely worth it.

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Memos

Memos