Ahh...August

[Writers Plot]

By guest blogger, Kate Flora

I grew up on a working farm on a hilltop in Maine. On nonschool days, Mom would hand each of us a typewritten chore list. The list might involve housekeeping—vacuuming, dusting, washing windows or ironing. In those days, we ironed everything, including my father’s underwear. It might involve working in one of the gardens—hoeing my father’s long, straight rows, wrestling with pigweed as tall as I was, or harvesting whatever crop was ripe. By August, the list invariably involved some chore relating to processing food for what we called “the long, cold winter.”

I’m decades away from that now, but summer will always recall memories of raising, harvesting, and storing food to fill the hundreds of canning jars we stored on the wooden shelves in the dusty cellar or the endless pint and quart-sized plastic containers to go into a freezer large enough to hold a moose. After the heat of the day had faded, we spent hours sorting, shelling, chopping and blanching. The stores of food growing. Steam rising from the blancher as ice clinked in the sink. The gentle burble of the water bath sealing jars of pickles or jam.

Hot summer afternoons filled the old farmhouse with scents rising from wooden bushel baskets of produce lined up on the tired brown linoleum, their contents changing as the season progressed. Bright peas and dark puckered spinach followed by green beans and yellow wax beans. Bushels of prickly, waxy green cucumbers for pickles. Light green cabbages. Dark red cabbages. Thick orange carrots. Broccoli clusters like green bridal bouquets. Golden corn shedding bits of drifting silk. The overwhelming onslaught of red, orange and yellow tomatoes. The pungent herbal scents of fresh dill, clusters of fresh picked oregano and tangy basil.

Sitting around the table on a warm summer night, the air outside filled with the screaming cacophony of insects, the occasional closer buzz of a mosquito, we would talk as we used hairpins to pit the sour red cherries massed in a huge bowl in the center of the table. Guests up from the city for some country time in Maine weren’t exempt. Even our international guests from India, Pakistan and Iran, in Maine as part of an international farm youth exchange program, got hairpins or knives and a quick lesson and were pressed into service snapping the ‘heads and tails’ off masses of just blanched green beans and putting them into canning jars.. It could never wait until tomorrow. Tomorrow the baskets would be filled with something else.

It was hard not to eat all the sweet raw peas as we shelled them, or the strawberries, raspberries and blueberries. Easy not the sample the rhubarb as we chopped. In our own kind of genetic experiment, we would collect all of the pure red ones as we shelled dried beans, saving them in a jar to plant the following summer. There were always contests to see who could get the whole peel off the apple in one continuous coil. Who could pick a quart of blueberries the fastest or fill a container with ripe, red strawberries.

Sometimes late in the evening, chores finished and the kitchen cleaned and ready for the next day’s harvest, we would slip back into our damp bathing suits and head down the hill into the dark for one last late night swim. Wriggling our toes down into cool wet sand as the night air filled with the maniac cries of loons out on the water. Sometimes the August meteor showers would turn the sky into our own private fireworks display. A few times we lay out in the backyard on blankets watching the stunning light show of Northern Lights.

Experts say that sounds and smells are the strongest triggers of memory. I always feel the truth of that most clearly in August when the natural world, baked by the summer heat and beginning to sense the approaching turn of the seasons, seems to be rushing toward a crescendo. Every insect is crying out for a chance to mate before it is too late. Wind-driven waves lap the lakeshore. The scent of damp, decaying leaves rises from the bank.

Midday sun pulls up the smells of drying hay, herbs and flowers. My father’s lawnmower throws out fresh-cut grass. In the blueberry field, the air shimmers with the scent of hot ripe fruit. The kitchen is full of the pungent steam of vinegary pickles. You could blindfold me and these smells would tell me it is August.

Kate Flora is the author of the Thea Kozak mysteries, and the Edgar-nominated author of the true-crime book Finding Amy. Visit her website at: www.kateflora.com

[Jackie Houchin]

Wow, Kate, you writing is FULL of wonderful, colorful, "sensual" pictures. I love it. And you are way to young to remember all those gardening and canning chores. Can't wait to read a book by you!