Stealing from the Birds

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I planted chokecherry bushes in my yard. I don’t know what I was thinking. Certainly I had not intended to create a chokecherry plantation. They were given to me, those desiccated branches. I stuck the dozen bare-naked sticks into the gumbo. I wasn’t sure any would survive. I hoped one chokecherry might live which I would keep pruned into a bush. Each August I would be able to go out into my back yard, fight off the birds with flailing arms and pick enough of the puny little fruits to make a single batch of jelly, nostalgia jelly, essence-of-memory chokecherry jelly.

When I was a child my grandmother always snorted at the idea of harvesting chokecherries. The miserable little fruits consist of nothing but skin, a drop of juice and a large pit. Back on our farm in Indiana, before we moved to Montana, we had pears, apricots, peaches, persimmons, plums, cherries and several old-fashioned apples. Real fruit. Nevertheless, desperate for sweets, every August Grandma and I crossed the river, tromped down into the barrow pit and emerged into a thicket of scrubby chokecherry trees. We worked hours to fill our pails. Sweat poured down our backs. Mosquitoes feasted unmolested on our flesh as we held the bucket with one hand and stripped the fruit with the other.

In our steam-filled kitchen we simmered the fruit, strained the juice, cooked it to the jell stage, washed, scalded and filled jars and carefully ladled melted paraffin over the hot jell. In September we tackled the native crab apples in much the same fashion. Come winter we treasured those jars of shimmering jelly.

Today at the market one may buy bushels of peaches or pears or apples. It’s all trucked in from Yakima or California or South America. One knows neither where the fruit originated nor when it was picked. Eating store-bought fruit is like playing the lottery. At times the pulp is woody and tasteless. When you pick a winner, it is sweet and juicy. Yet it is undeniably easy to buy fresh fruit in the produce department and jelly in brightly labeled jars on aisle three.

Ah, my chokecherries! Six lovely, low spreading bushes survived both late frosts and hailstorms. Every branch is loaded and bent to the ground. Some branches are so heavy they broke off at the trunk. All summer I guarded the bushes like a hawk. So did my cats. They lounged in the shade of the little trees, twitching their tails, ready to pounce on any unwary bird dumb enough to come near. The cherries prospered, grew plumper, fleshier and juicier than any chokecherry in my previous experience.

Finally picking day arrived. With my blue colander in hand, I stripped the heavy fruit from one branch. I grabbed a stool, sat down and reached into the drooping branches. In minutes I had heaped my bowl. I emptied it into a bucket and continued picking. When I had picked the ripest cherries from two of my bushes, I went inside to the kitchen. I processed a batch of jelly for myself, a batch for my children and a couple batches to give to visitors.

Now I was in a quandary. Sure, I could let the birds take the rest of the cherries. But surely there must be other women in town like me, hungry for chokecherry jelly but unwilling to head out into the country and battle through the brush. I made some phone calls. Marsha came over. I handed her a stool. She chose her bush, sat down and in minutes filled her bucket. I called Evelyn. She said she would love some but didn’t think she could pick them. So I picked her a bucketful and delivered it in exchange for a cup of tea, a cookie and conversation. Mary said, “Sondra, you know I don’t can!” Sandy said her fruit shelves were overloaded. Jane said, “The thought of canning anything makes my stomach hurt.” Lois said that she didn’t think she’d have time, but thanked me for calling. I’ll keep asking. Somebody will want to share my bird cherries.

Everything has been ripening late this year. One of my bushes is still covered with little green fruit. Give it another week or so of sunshine. Maybe I will generously leave the last cherries for the birds. Maybe.

Sondra Ashton
HDN: Looking out my back door
August 25, 2011
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Winter Jelly

Like a fine wine
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Winter Jelly
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I woke in the night to the howl of the wind battering the west wall of my house. A Chinook wind, the warm wind. I snuggled beneath my quilts and went back to sleep with a smile on my face. The first sound I heard when I awoke was the call of a mourning dove, the first dove of the year. I stuck my head out the door. Yes, the thermometer actually registered above freezing. Then and there I underwent a definite change in mind, body and spirit. Spring fever flooded every iota of my being.



February’s mail had brought seed and garden catalogs. Lovingly, I spread them out on my dining table and began dreaming of the day, still months ahead, when I could be digging, once again, in the dirt. I read my new herb book, purchased from the library’s discard rack for twenty-five cents, and planned another herb bed, or maybe two. I was restless. I looked around the house. Spring cleaning might be in order. I quickly buried that thought.



I paced from front door to back door, stopping at window vistas. The snow-banks did not magically disappear. I yearned for spring, longed for summer. Then I had an idea. I would make a batch of jelly.



Few sights are more beautiful, more satisfying to me than rows of canning jars filled with summer bounty lining the shelves of my basement pantry. Now you must understand, I have put up a life-time supply of jelly. It doesn’t matter. I love making jelly. I give it away with abandon, knowing that each year I will make more. How much more depends on the summer’s yield of fruit. Last year I had abundance, more fruit than time, more fruit than jars, so I stored bags of apples, raspberries, rhubarb and June berries in my freezer, some for pies, some a hedge against a sparse harvest next year.



I poured a bag of June berries into my kettle. I chopped up some juicy apples from the bowl on the counter, remembered a nearly empty bag of raisins, tossed them in. I thought cranberries might add an interesting element. A couple of handfuls, not too many. Then I noticed, in the lost and found department of my freezer, a pint of choke cherry juice. In it went. I set the pot on the stove to simmer.



Jelly making is a lengthy process, but well worth the hours of preparation, the trips up and down stairs for jars, ingredients, tools and kettles, followed by boiling and stirring and pouring and filling and processing.



Now rows of jars cool atop towels spread over the garden catalogs. I set one jar aside for tasting and immediate use.



I lift the jar and turn it, watch the sun’s rays enhance the brilliant ruby jewel tones. I hold the jar to my nose and sniff the earthy fragrance, elegant and flowery, with an explosion of spring. I dip in a spoon and lift the rich jell, lively with a perfect rounded shimmer, smooth and vigorous, clear yet velvety, noble. I rest a taste on my tongue. I find the blend complex, mouth filling and robust. Fruity with full-bodied balance, a vibrant banquet in a jar. Oh, what jelly!



This jelly could stand next to the finest wines without embarrassment. This jelly deserves the Grand Prize Purple Ribbon. I generously slather a slice of toast and savor a fruity bouquet of summer.



Sondra Ashton

HDN: Looking out my back door

February 17, 2011
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I'll Bid Five Dollars

This morning
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I’ll Bid Five Dollars


We drove out of Dodson several miles south, up onto the plateau, out toward the mountains. We passed the turn off with the long dirt road to the place where I used to live, another life-time ago. I recognized the same barbed-wire gate. Sun dappled the hills. A slight breeze played with the grasses. A perfect day.

Signs marked “Auction” pointed us in the right direction. Oak pallets, each one heaped with an assortment of goods, snaked across the field. Beyond the pallets, lined out like an old-soldiers honor guard at a funeral, slumped cars and pick-ups, trucks, tractors and machinery, dating from the early 1900’s upward, though none from this century. Several outbuildings were surrounded with carefully sorted stacks of lumber, tools, wire, boxes and bins of parts and nails and bolts.

I signed in and received number 100, a good omen, I thought. I wandered over to the pallets where the auctioneer worked. Trash and treasures. I could find a treasure in the mix on each pallet. I knew every person here would choose a different treasure.

I had not been there five minutes before I started a bid. Two and a half. The bid went to five. Why not? Okay. Seven-fifty. Once. Twice. Sold! Gulp! I had just bought a pallet. I had not really intended to buy it. I had no idea what was on the pallet other than a large brown boxy thing and an old pressure cooker minus the petcock.

The auctioneer proceeded along the row of pallets and I stopped to paw through my acquisitions. Within moments, I sold a box of dishes and another box of something else I did not want. That paid for my pallet. Before the day was over I had sold or gifted everything on my pallet except for the cooker and a box of canning jars. Now, I may never can meat or garden vegetables again, but, then again, I might.

An hour passed before I bought another pallet; this one for five dollars. It was heaped with odd dresser drawers, minus the dressers. Some old wood. A mix of cabinet doors and a sturdy box with dividers creating slots for storing all manner of things. It could have fit into a tool shed, a kitchen or an office. What did I buy? Art projects. Wait till you see what I can do with a dresser drawer.

I bid on some other stuff, but I set my limit, according to what I can see on the pallet. And no matter how much I might desire that particular treasure, I recognize when someone else wants it more.

An auction is a bitter-sweet place to spend the day. It is a book of somebody’s life, easily decipher and just as easily misunderstood. This place was probably homesteaded, and possibly in the last wave of homesteaders, if I read the pages right.

I look out over the hills. Even today something within me yearns for this life, isolated as it is, out here on the flat with the snow-covered Little Rockies directly south and the Bear Paws a notch over to the west. I lived out here during the sixties, snowed in every winter, farming with horses and an obsolete tractor, no running water though we had a good deep well, and no facilities. We never had any money to spend but we were rich in living.

My friends and I took a break from our heavy spending and sauntered over to the cook wagon. Replenished with a generous bowl of hearty beef stew, bread, dessert and a drink, we headed back into the fray.

We watched buyers haggle over the old car bodies. Much as I might want a restored antique auto, if I hauled one home, I could do no more than watch it continue to rust. The auctioneer, like a mother hen with chicks, herded his brood around some large sheds. We ended up over where a large fire had burned down the house.

Oh. That answered a lot of questions. I had figured one of the sheds was originally a house and the owner must have moved to town long ago. Wrong. His niece wandered over and told me that Ole was ninety-three years old, when last December he died in the house fire. She grew up out here on this farm and the pain of loss in her eyes was easy to read.

Around the edges of the pile of debris surrounding the burn were several old stools. Some had three legs. Some had four. Some had legs different lengths. Some legs faced different directions on the same stool. This was not craftsman work. But I recognize treasure when I see it. I piled up six of the stools and bid on them. I’ll paint them each a different color and plant them in my back yard. I’ll surround them with pots of petunias to honor the memory of the old gentleman and my day at the auction.
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