Pie
I don’t know when I became a farmer, but I was born a hunter-gatherer…. well at least a gatherer. I have attempted to plant & grow things since I was little & today I have a small vegetable garden, berry bushes, grape vines, and a few fruit tress. On the to do list for today were: berries to be picked, butternut squash to be harvested, & potatoes to be dug. All of these will be put aside for the graduation party to be held next weekend. The garlic has already been harvested & hung to dry. Except for my peas which failed miserably, the garden has been a great success this year. I am the only farmer in this household and I have too much farm for one farmer. I keep up as best as I can, but the work is never done and the weeds win every battle.
Today job one was blackberry picking. I have a small patch that arrived unannounced & uninvited two summers ago in the middle of my “wild flower garden” AKA “pretty weed area”. It now provides me with buckets of big black berries. When I was a kid going berry picking was a bona-fide family outing. These trips did not include a visit to a pretty gentleman’s farm for “pick your own berries” with cold drinks and ice cream served in the gift shop. No, we went on long hot car rides along dusty dirt roads in search of a bramble. We would stop & pick berries in waist-high weeds, complete with snakes and scary bugs. We got scraped up & we got dirty. That is what we did. Sometimes it was blackberries, other times elderberries, and once tiny wild blueberries. On occasion there was advance planning involved in these events & we would have bologna sandwiches on white bread with yellow mustard and a big thermos jug of red Kool-Ade. Almost always my little sister would get car sick & vomit, in the car, never out the window. This was always good for some screaming from the back seat. Sometimes we would pass a rider on a horse and I would daydream that one day I would ride a horse along country roads. That was always a thrill for me and I am saddened that my girls don’t seem to enjoy the same excitement over nothing at all.
At the end of the day, our reward would be pie. Pies were a big deal in our house. It takes skill to make a great pie with a perfectly flaky crust & a fruit filling that has just the right amount of juicy goodness, yet doesn’t make the bottom crust soggy, but, still is wet enough to taste of fresh berries. If we had enough, we would have a bowl of berries with milk & sugar on top. The cold milk turning all purple on our sun/Pontiac station wagon-warmed berries.
Tomorrow it’s peaches. The tree is heavy with them and the cats can scarcely keep the squirrels at bay. After several hours of peeling & slicing there will be pie, and I guarantee that crust will be flaky.
so I can come and have a piece of peach ie???
YOU GET BACK IN THE KITCHEN, AND MAKE ME SOME PIE!
~ Cartman
Apples, Peaches, Pumpkin Pie, who’s not ready holler I!
“You like pie? I like pie.” ~ Barack Obama
“Candy might be sweet, but it’s a traveling carnival blowing through town. Pie is home. People always come home.” ~ Pushing Daisies
“Men may come and men may go…..but Pie goes on for ever.” ~ George Augustus Sala
“Promises and pie-crust are made to be broken.” ~ Jonathan Swift
“More people will come if they think we have punch and pie.” ~ Eric Cartman (South Park)
“Pie is the food of the heroic. No pie eating nation can ever be vanquished.” ~NY Times
“When you die, if you get a choice between going to regular heaven or pie heaven, choose pie heaven. It might be a trick, but if it’s not, mmmmmmmm, boy.” – Jack Handy
“I had a vision that a man came unto us on a flaming pie, and he said, ‘You are Beatles with an A.’ And so we were.”~ John Lennon
“Never doubt that a small, committed group of people with pies can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” – Subcommandante Tofutti
Work and pray, live on hay, you’ll get pie in the sky when you die.
Joe Hill
“A mother is a person who seeing there are only four pieces of pie for five people, promptly announces she never did care for pie.”
Tenneva Jordan
“Sometimes it’s like you’re a big pie settin’ on the table, and everybody runs up and gets their piece of you. When it’s over, the plate’s empty.”
Loretta Lynn
“The Devil makes his Christmas pie of lawyers’ tongues”
English Proverb
“We must have a pie. Stress cannot exist in the presence of a pie.”
— David Mamet (Boston Marriage)
“Cut my pie into four pieces, I don’t think I could eat eight.”
— Yogi Berra
Sandy, I just re-lived my childhood through your post. We, too, went berry picking in the brambles and the weeds — all through the Glenmoore area. I have no idea whether the trips were planned or random, but they always included my aunt (who died young and whom I still miss dearly), her kids, my mom (and the big wood-paneled station wagon), my youngest brother, and me eating as much as we were picking. When we got home, however, there wasn’t pie — there was jelly, jelly, jelly!! Jars and jars of it to last through the cold winter months. To this day, I cannot get enough elderberry jelly. My mom doesn’t make it any more, but she buys it for me (and Emery, who shares my love for it) whenever she sees it at a farmers market so that WE can have jars and jars to last through the cold winter months! Thanks for the trip down a fondly treasured hot and dusty summer memory lane.