Fall Canning

Tucked in a far corner of the basement is a little room lined on opposite sides with shelves reaching to the ceiling.  On the shelves sat rows of jars, some full, some empty, some quarts and pints, some smaller with jellies and jams, some larger with pickles.  In our farmhouse there was an additional root cellar dug  out beyond the regular basement which was cool, dark and had a dirt floor.  Against one wall a crib held the potatoes for the year.  In another corner was a box of carrots covered with straw.

Root cellars were standard equipment in early North Dakota homes, and fall was the season for canning.  Actually everything revolved around winter; spring, summer and fall were for planting, growing, gathering and preserving food for the winter.  Most of the food was grown in family gardens but some foods that didn't grow locally were ordered and purchased in large boxes from the local grocer.  Fruits like peaches, pears and plums were examples.

Now we are 1500 miles from North Dakota and a half century later but still canning food for the winter.  We picked the peaches from a local farm; the pears and apples from our trees; beans from the local fruit stand and tomatoes from the garden.  Most garden products typically are blanched and frozen these days and spices and herbs are dried for storage.

Water boils on the stove.  Peaches or tomatoes are heated so that they peel easily and then sliced into wedges.  The jars are washed in hot soapy water, rinsed and filled with the wedges which were waiting in a bath of cool water.  Rims are wiped clean for a good seal, boiling water, maybe with a little bit of sugar is poured to fill the jar.  A new cover is dipped in boiling water and secured on the jars with bands.  These then bathe in boiling water for 15 minutes after which they rest and cool down before they are labeled and join the rows of jars in the root cellar.

This may be a far cry from what happens in most contemporary homes and a poor facsimile of what happened more than a half century ago, but it is here.  It's a connection to the past, a family event and way of securing good food with no preservatives.  It's part of who we are and what we consider valuable.  Good eating.

Did I mention the sightings of mice and the evidence that mice were in the root cellar tucked away in the corner?

Threshing Day

Typically the day had the potential of being a hot one, in the nineties or possibly the hundreds.  Even during the morning chores there was a sense of excitement looking to the south and watching between tasks.  It was thrashing day and Uncle Karl, actually Dad's uncle, was going to come from his place a mile south of our farm through the pastures with his low-slung metal codded tires Minneapolis Moline and this thrashing machine.

Once he was in the yard he would walk around the thrasher, checking each gear and chain making certain that everything was probably greased and oiled.  The slow running exposed chain spit the oil that came from the long-nosed oilcan as they quickly turned over the gears.  Each bearing in which the staffs turned was lubricated with grease forced down a small pipe by the tightening of a grease-cap.  After the cap hit it limit, the cap was removed, refilled and replaced on its home ready to force more grease into the bearings.

I was quite young and there was no task for me other than to bring water and sandwiches to the workers so I wasn't on site to be fully involved.  Dad scooped up the bundles of oats, typically, and dumped them into the wagon from which someone pitch-forked them into the throat of the thrasher.  Uncle Karl's tractor sat in front of the thrasher with a very long belt to run the thrasher.  The straw blew out the back through a large pipe which could be manually adjusted to carefully create a stack of straw. The grain itself came out another pipe on the side of the thrasher into awaiting pickups.  Oats was not fun to stand in so I seldom would climb into the pickup to play in the grain.

Besides the work of thrashing, many stories are told about the meals that the farmer wives put together for the thrashing crews.  I can't say that I remember any significant events surrounding those meals which in our case only included Karl, Dad, grandpa and my uncle Heinie.  While the same crew worked all three farms I was allowed only to visit the fields when they thrashed on our farm.

Games

"Rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief,"

Is this even politically correct now?

"Doctor, lawyer, merchant, chief."

As a child I never wanted to be a chief; I wasn't even an Indian much less a chief.

We would recite this lines when we got dressed and counted the buttons on our clothes: button one, rich man; button two, poor man; and so on. Or if noticed that someone had lots of buttons, we would go through the same verse.

If you had more than eight buttons, you'd start over again, but I remember almost never starting over and often stopping in the first line. Girls had a better chance of getting into the second line.

WIth no television and limited access, our heads were filled with little verses and mind games. Cousin Cheryl came with a verse during one of her rare childhood visits from MInneapolis or California. It was designed to appear as a speech:

"Ladies and gentlemen, horses and mules,
I hate to tell you, but you're all darn fools.
I come before you to stand behind you...
Admission free, pay at the door
Grab a chair and sit on the floor!"

That's all I remember but I found this version:

"Ladies and gentlemen, horses and mules
Cross-eyed mosquitos and bold-legged fools
I've come before you to stand behind you
To tell you something I know nothing about
Next Thursday, which is Good Friday
We'll have a father's meeting for mother's only
Admission free, pay at the door
Grab a chair and sit on the floor!"

From the third grade which was at the end of the hall on the second floor of our school and was designed more as a foyer to the fire escape at the rear of the building, I remember:

"Christopher went
When he was sent,
And came when he was told,
And all together
Whatever the weather
Was brave, bright and bold.
When he was nine, or maybe ten,
He traveled the world again and again
With a cape, a cap and a fountain pen."

It's probably the only poem I remember.

Crab Apple Tree

Throughout my summer day I pass by a tree filled with tasty ripe but tart pie cherries. It is simple to reach up, grab a couple and eat the tantalizing miniature orbs. Propelling the seeds across the lawn is a part of the enjoyment even though I'm reminded each time of their potential by the many seedlings in that area.

Some fifty years ago about the same time of the year, late August or early September I would repeat the same moves with some modifications. I would be on a tractor driving to and from the fields towing a wagon either filled with grain from the combine or silage for the silo. If the route took me pass the chokecherry bushes, I would load up on the berries that turned my mouth blue and my throat would, in a sense, choke. Hence, the name of the berry. Later in the season after emptying the silage from the wagon, I would detour under the crab apple tree and grab enough to keep me busy nibbling while driving to the field. They were so tart that they had no other use. But I loved the diversion.

Not many fruit trees survived the North Dakota winters, in fact my favorite crab apple tree had been joined by several plum and pie apple trees at their planting but stood essentially alone as I ate of it. Our Ziegler grandparents enjoyed adventuring into new territory with fruit as they had several apple trees and in the 50's a pear tree that actually produced pears. On the other side of the garden were patches of raspberries and strawberries that were the envy of my childhood. I don't know that the pear tree has survived these 50 years.

There are stories of man who wandered the West sowing apple seeds and who became known as Johnny Appleseed. His good fortune apparently didn't infect our part of North Dakota.

Churning butter

A wandering glance around our kitchen took my eyes momentarily to an old butter churn; the large glass jar has a slight crack. My wondering why we kept this dust collector was immediately overshadowed by a question of who used it and when and even where.

There's something in the rears of my struggling mind that says Mom may have made our butter at one time, after all we were on a dairy farm and always milked cows. Before the years when we were selling raw milk, the milk was separated into skim milk and cream, the source of butter. I know that Mom's mother made their butter.

Walking into grandma's house always smelled like a farm house, but then it was a farm house. The smell might have been stronger here than in other farm houses because they separated their milk in the house. It was the only heated building on their farm.

Passing through the first entrance gave one no warmth from the winter cold as the first room was more of a porch, where one would leave your coat that had brushed against the cows and the boots that followed the pigs to their feed. A single step up and through a second door on your left put you into the big main room of the house. It was the almost "everything" room. Straight ahead was a second room which was the "living" room furnished with a couch, a couple easy chairs, a old ornate china closet and a pump organ which later was replaced by a piano. Uncle Lenhart like to tickle the keyboards.

Off the living room was a small master bedroom, and years later a bathroom was added in one corner. Off to the right in the main room were doors to the upstairs and downstairs and a cooking area. The wood cook stove served to heat the house and prepare the meals. As the house was modernized an electric stove was added beside the wood stove and the hand pump was replaced with faucets for cold and hot running water.

I never got over 12 years old, before grandpa died. He had a big overstuffed rocking chair by the window just to the left of the main entrance. Tall and lanky, as I remember him, and seldom a smile. He had a cane, as I remember, that he'd try to hook us with. Boy, that memory is vague. He always seemed old, but then he was 60 when I was born, and 72 when he died.

During my childhood, the neighbors still gathered together in the late summer for threshing. There's a story about grandma when the threshing crew was at her house and she was responsible for feeding them. I'm sure that the food was home grown and cooked, which included baked bread and homemade butter. As the crew gathered around the table filling their plates, grandma had forgot to put butter on the table and so when one of the crew not seeing any butter, called out, "Please, pass the butter," she was very embarrassed.

So a quick glance around the room took me back some sixty years. And the butter churn continues to gather dust until it instills another memory even though it's owner is still not known.

Picture of Mom and Dad's wedding

Somewhere in the flatlands of Wyoming is a third cousin with the name of Gary Weisz, Weisz being the birth name of our mother's mother. As member of my generation, he has retired and finding time to do things like dig through the genealogy of the Weisz family. One of his reference points is the consolidation of names and dates that I had gathered from my mother and put on the Internet as a reference. I am so grateful for his efforts because I have not had a chance to upgrade my data for about a decade and the information is getting stale.

During one of his monthly phone calls last week he referred to a picture of a wedding party picture on the steps of St Johns church in Hebron. A couple days ago I received a print of that picture with attached names. It was a picture with Erna and Erwin as the bride and groom, with two attendants on each side and the parents on a higher step behind them. I don't know that I had ever seen this picture and was treasure to receive.

A week earlier he sent an invitation to the Weisz family reunion in Kaylor, South Dakota, in June 2011. It is a great opportunity to catch up with what is happening in the Weisz family or get to know them for the first time. You'll also meet some Zieglers there.

First crocuses of the spring

It's hardly past the first week of February, but this year in the foothills on the edge of the Willamette Valley the first colors of the year are peaking through the underbrush. They're yellow, these first bloomers, unlike the wild purple ones on the north side of the hills of the western North Dakota prairies.

There's a fondness for crocus in my being. Maybe this came from grandma Sax, Marie, who seemed to have some on her table soon as the first ones appeared. Maybe this came from Mom who would drive me to the more prolific hill almost a mile from the house before I was grown enough to either walk that distance or drive a vehicle. We'd pick them when we went to get the cows in for milking, which, when I was in grade school, was as soon as we got off the school bus in the afternoon.

Conveniently the crocus would bloom around the first of May so they were available to put in the May basket that I'd put on the doorstep and ring the doorbell for Mom. I have no idea from where the tradition came, but after I rang the bell I'd run away and Mom would come out chasing me, catch me and give me a kiss. Well, at least that happened once and stuck in my mind as annual forever. Maybe this is the memory or emotion in the back of my mind that sparks the romantic part of me when the crocuses show color in the spring.