Harvest Time
Every year at about this time, my family would pile into the jeep and make a pilgrimage to Carmichael's Produce. In the barn, bushel baskets of potatoes, yams, and okra stood alongside whole tables full of seasonal fruit, mostly apples still dusty from the trees, and peaches, their smell drunkenly thick. A real cider press rolled out dark, cloudy liquid which was bottled unpasteurized on the spot. Jars of honey lined one wall, complete with comb. There were whole boxes of nuts, pecans and walnuts, peanuts raw or freshly roasted. A table full of homemade candy.
In the greenhouses, gourds and pumpkins lay on piles of haybales in lumpy masses, like a vegetable triage ward. There we would spend what seemed like hours poring over the pumpkins, grooming through the gourds, admiring the outlandish shapes and vivid colors of the varietals, the hollow rasp of the dried birdhouse gourds swarming with seeds, the smooth skin of the pumpkins. The crisp October air was always full of blowing wisps of hay, the wind whispered through the cornshucks. The smell is one that is woven thick into the weft of my soul . . . the smell of dirt and hay and sunshine, the faint, sourish, vinegar smell of slightly spoiled pumpkins, the scent of turning leaves and autumn wind.
In a madcap rush to reclaim part of my childhood, and thus, part of my soul, Husband and I revisited Carmichael's today, and it was both more and less than I expected.
Once, nothing surrounded it but farmland, the fields between our town and the next one over. Now it inhabits an in-between zone where car dealerships and fast-food restaurants vie with clapboard fireworks stands (boarded up for the winter) and produce stands selling "watermelon's" or "caning tomateos." Perhaps "peach orchard honey from Real Bee's." This alone made me sad.
Perhaps they have not done as well in recent years. The pumpkin yard wasn't as full as I recall. The dozen tables of produce in the barn were gone, there were only three, and what there was looked poor in comparison. Even accounting for the gilding of memory, this lily has faded.
Yet it smelled the same. Everything was still there. And it was more than I expected because it fulfilled me still, to stand among the ripe, rich pumpkins on the second of October, on a day with no clouds and a blinding silver sun, watching cornshucks wave at my shadow. It wasn't what I remembered, and perhaps because I wasn't expecting it to be, it was okay.
We ended up with two fat pumpkins that will be ritually gutted somewhere around the 25th, some apples, some peppers, some squash, and some dry gourds I intend to make into boxes. It was great, smelling the hay, fingering pearly shafts of millet, the hard teeth of Indian corn, the raspy shells of peanuts and the papery wrappers of huge purple onions. Laughing at all the phallic produce -- winter squash, zucchini, cucumbers, the hairy, insectile pods of okra, gourds with long necks and dangling bottoms, some ramrod-straight, some sadly curved; and yet admiring it anyway for the reminder of bounty in all its forms, a visual warning that this is the last reaping, the last harvest, before winter falls. A time of plenty before the cold.
So I completed an October ritual that I haven't been able to enjoy for years now, and I feel better for it.
As we left, some blonde woman in worn bluejeans was chucking haybales into the back of a pickup truck.
Fuck it. I love Oklahoma.
link
In the greenhouses, gourds and pumpkins lay on piles of haybales in lumpy masses, like a vegetable triage ward. There we would spend what seemed like hours poring over the pumpkins, grooming through the gourds, admiring the outlandish shapes and vivid colors of the varietals, the hollow rasp of the dried birdhouse gourds swarming with seeds, the smooth skin of the pumpkins. The crisp October air was always full of blowing wisps of hay, the wind whispered through the cornshucks. The smell is one that is woven thick into the weft of my soul . . . the smell of dirt and hay and sunshine, the faint, sourish, vinegar smell of slightly spoiled pumpkins, the scent of turning leaves and autumn wind.
In a madcap rush to reclaim part of my childhood, and thus, part of my soul, Husband and I revisited Carmichael's today, and it was both more and less than I expected.
Once, nothing surrounded it but farmland, the fields between our town and the next one over. Now it inhabits an in-between zone where car dealerships and fast-food restaurants vie with clapboard fireworks stands (boarded up for the winter) and produce stands selling "watermelon's" or "caning tomateos." Perhaps "peach orchard honey from Real Bee's." This alone made me sad.
Perhaps they have not done as well in recent years. The pumpkin yard wasn't as full as I recall. The dozen tables of produce in the barn were gone, there were only three, and what there was looked poor in comparison. Even accounting for the gilding of memory, this lily has faded.
Yet it smelled the same. Everything was still there. And it was more than I expected because it fulfilled me still, to stand among the ripe, rich pumpkins on the second of October, on a day with no clouds and a blinding silver sun, watching cornshucks wave at my shadow. It wasn't what I remembered, and perhaps because I wasn't expecting it to be, it was okay.
We ended up with two fat pumpkins that will be ritually gutted somewhere around the 25th, some apples, some peppers, some squash, and some dry gourds I intend to make into boxes. It was great, smelling the hay, fingering pearly shafts of millet, the hard teeth of Indian corn, the raspy shells of peanuts and the papery wrappers of huge purple onions. Laughing at all the phallic produce -- winter squash, zucchini, cucumbers, the hairy, insectile pods of okra, gourds with long necks and dangling bottoms, some ramrod-straight, some sadly curved; and yet admiring it anyway for the reminder of bounty in all its forms, a visual warning that this is the last reaping, the last harvest, before winter falls. A time of plenty before the cold.
So I completed an October ritual that I haven't been able to enjoy for years now, and I feel better for it.
As we left, some blonde woman in worn bluejeans was chucking haybales into the back of a pickup truck.
Fuck it. I love Oklahoma.
link