Black Cauldrons Brew

Nearly every fall someone in our farmland would decide to make apple butter "the old fashioned way". A few families would gather in someone's kitchen and prepare about ten bushels of apples (Golden and/or Red Delicious).

The weary teenage daughters would be given the job of peeling those damn apples, all done in one day.  The next day, their hands will show the tiny cuts, and the hands would be cramping.

Meanwhile, the experienced farm wives would be cooking down the apples into a lumpy applesauce.  Why not purchase the store-bought sauce?  It was NOT DONE back then, besides which not many stores carried it in the late 50s to mid-60s.

Source: Minnesota maple syrup

The next day the husbands would have built up a fire of a slow-burning hardwood, some wood that I guess has magic powers.  The fire would get to the hot ember stage.  By then they would have set up a rented cauldron as shown below.

Why rented?  Those things were handed down from generation to generation, and were seldom produced anymore, as the kettles were darn expensive, especially since the interior was  copper.  It had to be copper, because copper did not impart any metallic taste.

source: $300
This is a rather small cauldron--the actual size would be much larger.

Then the dishpans of the cooked-down apples were poured into the cauldron. This cauldron
would be stirred constantly with a paddle that reached
to the very bottom of the very large
cauldron.

The paddle was made of wood, although the handle may have been made of something else, 
that would not leach flavor into the apple butter as it cooked down.  The apples cooked slowly...All stinking day, from early sunrise to almost sunset.

Source: Bubble and boil

At some point the farm women would bring out the secret ingredients used to sweeten and flavor the apple mixture, without which would result in a fairly sour and miserable runny applesauce.  Each of the women would agree on the ingredients.  

My mother preferred "Red Hots", a candy that still exists.  It is dark red, with spicy cinnamon, almost hot, taste.  This gave the apples a great color and sweetness, which would be augmented by tons of white cane sugar.

Then, at another point during the cooking, my grandmother (a true matriarch) would retrieve old silver dollars, which were true silver from the 1800s. 

They were used by her family, from long ago.  They tossed these five or six silver dollars in the cauldron and stir the apple mixture with the paddle.

ebay

The silver dollars scraped the bottom of the cauldron, preventing the now-thick mixture from burning, and ruining the whole two days' worth of work.

I was never in on this ritual, although I observed it from the porch, as the Apple Butter Cooking was done at a nippy time of year. I wanted to go back into the kitchen.  But there was a lot of laughter and low talk.
The daughters often speculated
about this, even suspecting some sort
of magic spells were being
chanted.  Silly.

Archeology Was Calling Me

Sebastian99 Source

Archeology was calling me, I was sure of it.  A junior in high school—it was time to make choices about the future.  And I was gonna choose archeology, because that was where the action was.

Dig in Israel

What action?  In James Michener’s The Source action abounded.  Each layer of civilization revealed new characters and new conflict.  New and old blended, with lots of action.  History was shown to me in the lives of the people who passed through that dig site through the years.  I had never thought of history in that way, where the actions of just one person could change the course of many lives. 

I wanted to be that person, in the middle of the action.  But, no, in my rural countryside, surrounded by cornfields and livestock, I saw no such action.  Life was a day-to-day routine of work-school-work-sleep with eating thrown in for the heck of it.  It was life at its most boring.

But those people in past, the ones about who whom history talks?  They really lived. They made pots and traded with other cultures, they did stuff.  At least, that is what the 15 year old me thought.

When the local newspaper announced that the University of Illinois was establishing a dig site near Kampsville, Illinois, to document a huge Native American settlement, my heart leapt in my chest.  They even wanted summer interns, high school students to participate for free!  It would not cost me a penny to be part of this adventure.

Cahokia Mound near St. Louis, MO

When I pleaded my case to my parents to allow me to be part of this endeavor, they exchanged looks and said NO without listening to my argument.  They shut me down cold.

Instead of hunched over in a hardened mud pit under the sweltering sun brushing minute dust particles away from pottery shards, I would be hunched over a garden under a sweltering sun, picking strawberries/tomatoes/green beans. 

Life is not fair.

P is for ...

In Preacher's Creek, Ch. 1  (first 550+ words)

            There are fragments of memories that float around in my head, things from the earliest years in Preacher’s Creek.  Smells and sounds of a big family dinner, ham with scalloped potatoes.  Being surrounded by giants, and seeing only their knees, or looking up their noses.  My father’s soft aroma, being nestled into the crick of his elbow, while he read the newspaper.  The security of my little sweaty hand in my momma’s warm hand, her fingers caressing the top of my fingers.

            These quick snap-shot float through my brain with no words attached to them, only deep reactions of emotions to events that swirled around me, before I had learned words and could attach meaning.

            But then, almost overnight, all those images settled like lime Jell-O in a refrigerator, going from hot sweet sticky liquid to a jiggling solid.  All those fragments became a moving picture in which my family was the stars and Preacher’s Creek was our stage.

            It was Memorial Day, I was told, and we went to the Hunter Cemetery.  We spent a lot of time there, visiting headstones, laying out flowers, and telling stories about the dead people who were lying peacefully under the grass. 

            I had been given some pretty straight forward instructions, a face to face with Momma, where she looked deep into my eyes, with her hands on each side of my head.  “Now, Ellen Jo Carter,” she had said.  When she used the whole name, it meant serious business.  “You are going stay right here, in this spot, and you will keep your clothes, your shoes, and your socks on.”  Momma had covered all the bases here, which was important when dealing with a legalistic four year old.

            I had tried her out, just to see if she was really paying attention to me when she moved on to another headstone, leaving me on that spot.  Took off my shoes, and was just starting in on the socks, when swoop Momma came down from the sky, like a giant eagle snatching up a helpless baby lamb.  SMACK!  her hand descended on my scrawny cute little butt, leaving a pink hand print under my panties, the ones with little yellow chicks.  

            Tears never worked with her, I would learn over and over in the years I was with my mother.  She pointed dispassionately, wordlessly, to my discarded shoes and lone sock.  Whimpering and looking up at her with big pleading eyes, I went ahead and put them back on.  I had been so close to clothes-free romping through the vibrant green grass of Hunter Cemetery.  I would have left panties on, but everything else would have been tossed behind my great-grandmother’s headstone.

            Placing my hand-pink butt on that spot, I gazed longingly at my two brothers, Ron and Kent.  Ron was almost a giant, since he turned nine years old, and he knew absolutely everything, and he could even read.  Kent was only a year older than I was, but he was a big kid.  His slicked down black hair never moved a hair as he chased Ron, “I’m gonna get you this time!”  His glasses were steamed up, so I don’t know how he thought he would have any luck catching Ron. 

            I swiveled around tenderly, the prickly grass grinding into the little yellow chicks, and faced my great-grandmother’s headstone.  Tracing the carved letters, I had no idea that my name was the same as hers. 

After the W.I.P. blogfest, I received so much feedback, that I felt invigorated to approach my book from a different angle.  This is the result.  

Many thanks! again to the A-Z Blogfest team.

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