NATURE’S
BOUNTY. Notice the capital letters, showing reverence. When my husband and I bought our 1993-built
home on half an acre here on the Central Coast, the size of the one-story
house, it’s California ranch style, and its half acre lot were big sellers,
but the side-yard, filled with fruit trees tickled my fancy. All the trees were puny, but the
potential! Two apricot, two plum, one
each of orange, fig, peach, apple, and lemon.
The peach and lemon died and I added an Asian pear apple, a lime and a
grapefruit. Every year the orange, fig, and apple produce. Not the apricot and
plum. But this year, the plum tree went
absolutely wild. I had enough plums to
feed the multitudes. I froze jam and
dried plums, but I also froze fresh fruit for future cobblers and ice cream
toppings.
So now you have
the background. The point is, I come
from a long line of fruit canners. Do
you?
At the height of
the plum season, I had to leave my house for a two-week family reunion. I invited about twenty women to come pick
plums while I was gone. Takers out of
twenty? Eight. Why? The
women who came before I left town and after, were canners. They’d grown up in households where if you
grew fruit, you canned it; if your neighbors had extra fruit, they shared and
you canned theirs. If the peaches or
pears were cheap in the marketplace, you bought a bushel and canned the fruit. If you heard someone had Santa Rosa plums, you came running. I come from a family of canners. Do you?
Before I left
for my trip, some of women came over to my house to get the lay of the
land. Most of them were wide-eyed at the
bounty, excited to tell me stories of making jam, preserves and cobblers with
fresh fruit. They left my house excited
about their bags of fruit and anxious to tell me, when I returned, how they
used the plums.
Eight out of
twenty women who pulled plums off my trees were canners. I come from a long line of fruit
canners. Do you?
****
Fear Land is a finalist for a Rone Award, thanks to all of you who convinced the Rone judges take a last look at my novel.
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/4990049.Rolynn_Anderson
