Crab Apple Pies

A variety of crab apples.

Mom said the crab apple trees Great Aunt Fern had planted years ago were good for nothing, and she didn’t care if I picked those apples or their blossoms, but I was never, ever to touch her prized, modern Transparent tree that grew on the edge of the orchard on our farm. The Transparent grew large, juicy yellow apples that Mom cut up every August, soaked in salt water, and then measured into exact amounts for apple cobblers or apple pies, and plopped them into freezer bags and into the back room's 1948 freezer.

Beaver, my closet companion, trailed behind as I wandered through the orchard overgrown with burdocks, golden rod, and bushes with red branches. You could break off a red branch, stick a crab apple on the end, and fling it like a whip, making a whizzing sound. The neighbor boys and my brother and I would aim the apples for the trout pond beyond Dad’s potato field. Sometimes their apples would plop into the water. Mine never did.

At first I was only going to pick up two or three little apples, holding them in my hands, but then I got greedy and picked several handfuls, stuffing them into my pockets and some in my arms. They were all so pretty.

Beaver followed me back to the house where I washed the apples in Mom’s slate sink and used a paring knife to cut the apples on her wooden cutting board that you could pull out from under the counters, right above the flour and sugar bins. I didn’t cut off the skins because the apples were so small.

I pulled open the flour bin and mixed some flour with salt and water and made flat crusts to fit my junior pie tins that were a lot smaller than Mom’s. I wanted to try them out in a real oven. I sprinkled some sugar on top of the apples, rolled out more dough, and did the crisscross design on top.

Mom came in from the barns and asked what I was doing.

“Making crab apple pies.”

“What did you use in the dough?”

“Flour, water, and salt.”

She shook her head. “You forgot the shortening. Flour and water make glue. It’ll bake up as hard as nails and won’t be fit to eat. And the apples are too sour for pies.”

I sighed. All that work for nothing.

“You can bake them anyway,” she said, “and feed them to the dog.”

I felt better. Beaver’s mother was a German shepherd guard dog at Loring Air Force Base in nearby Limestone. That’s where Beaver had been born and named by a little boy who took care of her. Beaver worked hard guarding the farm and deserved a treat.

“I’ll help you with the oven,” Mom said.

Mom's Florence propane and kerosine stove. A wedding present from 1948 

and in use until the farm was sold in 1988.

She turned the porcelain knob to “On,” opened the oven door, and placed a wooden, lit match next to the bottom left and right sides. In less than a second, blue flames appeared.

She let the oven warm up. Then she placed the little pies on the black grate in the middle, closed the door, and turned the timer on for a few minutes. When it rang, I opened the oven door and looked at the golden pies with juice oozing out through the sides.

After they cooled a little, I tried a piece. It was sour and the crust was tough.

“Beaver will love them,” Mom said.

I took the pies outside to the corner of the lawn between the porch and the shed, next to the large hole that Joe and his friends had been digging for years. Joe said they were digging to China, but all they’d found so far were a few square-headed nails and some gray dirt he said was gun powder.

Stepping away from the hole, I gave Beaver first one pie and then the other. Mom was right—she loved them.

I wondered what Aunt Fern ever used those crab apples for. They must have been good for something.

Some time later, Beaver and I were exploring the house cellar pantry on a hot day when the cellar was cool and quiet.

Aunt Fern's butter churn that was also in the cellar room.

I unlatched an old-fashioned metal hook on the front of a plain, wooden cabinet that sat in one corner of the pantry. Mom’s canned beans and cranberry jellies and sweet and sour pickles were all lined up on clean shelves on the other side of the room. But inside the old cabinet were shelves lined with canning jars sealed with rusted wires stuffed with bits of rags to keep them tight.

These weren’t Mom’s jars. They must have been Aunt Fern’s. Maybe Mom never dared to get rid of them, thinking Aunt Fern would return someday from Florida and want her canned goods back.

Some jars held pickles. Others held things long deteriorated into globs of yucky stuff.

But on the second shelf were jars filled with little apples still on their stems. Crab apples. Aunt Fern had pickled them. And that is what she used them for.

And so, despite Mom’s declaration that crab apples were good for nothing, they had been good for something. To Aunt Fern, and to me, and to our brave guard dog--who wasn't fussy.

Diggin' Potatoes and Countin' Tickets

Picking potatoes in Fred Russell's "big field," circa 1970s.                           Acrylic painting by Cheryl (Dean) Everett.

Grampy Russell tossed the contents of a long, wooden box onto the table—hundreds of dusty paper tickets with numbers on them. “There, that'll keep you busy,” he said as he left with the box. “I’ll bring in the red truck’s later.”

The red truck was only used when the newer blue and gray trucks were too busy hauling potatoes out of the field. That meant we had a big production day, which meant a lot more tickets to count. I was old enough, in 1964, to help.

Every flat-bodied truck had a box attached to the back of the cab, next to the hydraulic lift. Each box had a round hole in the lid attached with hinges where the truck crews dropped in tickets from every 165-pound barrel of potatoes filled by pickers.

Schools all over Aroostook County--including our's in Fort Fairfield--were closed for about three weeks so students and adults could harvest the crop.

Every picker in Dad’s field had a wad of tickets with numbers printed on them, a different number for each worker. A picker would stick one ticket into a groove on the rim of every barrel he (or she) filled in his own section in the field that Dad had paced out beforehand. That’s how we knew how many barrels of potatoes were picked.

Iris Russell sorting tickets in the 1970s.

In the kitchen, Mom grabbed a large handful of tickets and formed three rows in front of her on the table covered with old newspapers. She lined up the tickets in the order of their numbers.

I did the same. Then I pulled out a “5” from my handful and looked at her pile. She already had several.

“That’s Jean,” Mom said. “She’s havin’ a good day.”

Jean was the same age as my brother, who was five years older than me. Joe was working in the potato house where, as each storage bin filled up with potatoes, the men lifted more floor boards and moved the conveyors. The potato house crew also made sure only potatoes were stored, not rocks or dead tops from the potato plants that some kids tried to put in their barrels to fill them up faster.

Mom’s tickets made a snapping sound as she laid first one, then two, then three or more on top of each other. Her hands seemed to fly as she sorted, knowing instinctively where number 10 went and where her pile of 22s were.

My ticket piles kept falling on top of each other.

After a couple hours, Gramp came back with more. He had them in a large cardboard box this time and dumped the contents onto the table, sending my piles toppling over. I pushed the new tickets back into the big mound in the middle and re-arranged the ones I’d already sorted.

Opened ticket box attached to the back of the truck cab, next to the hydraulic lift.

We finished just before supper. Mom had gone in the car to take her two loads of pickers back to their homes. Dad took more kids in the pickup truck with the caboose—a wooden cab with benches inside—on the back.

Grammy Amy, who had come over to help, got out the bag of elastics.

“Number ones,” she said.

I grabbed Mom’s pile and mine. She put them together with her’s and wrapped them with an elastic. We lined them up in numerical order inside a narrow, cardboard box. Then I folded the newspapers and put them away until supper was over.

The trucks hauled in later because the pickers had picked more barrels of potatoes than usual. They were picking faster because they could see that the big field was almost done and the faster they picked, the sooner they’d be finished. The weather was warm and dry, the field was dry, and the two-row digger didn’t have any breakdowns.

Mom and Dad were both late getting back and supper didn’t happen until 6. After supper, Mom and Gram cleared the table, I unfolded the newspapers, and Gramp dumped the rest of the tickets collected that day. In less than an hour we had them all sorted and put together with the others.

A page from Iris Russell's harvest records for 1964.

Then we started counting.

I picked up one wad of tickets, rolled down the elastic a little, and flipped each ticket forward, using my index and middle fingers, until I had handled and counted them all. Mom told me to watch for any tickets with a different number and for tickets folded over that might be missed.

Finally, I took a pencil and wrote “42” on the top ticket and put them next to Gram to recount.

After counting them, she said, “I make it 41.”

Mom recounted. “Gram’s right. It’s 41.”

An hour later, we had counted all the tickets at least twice to make sure our totals were correct. Then Dad came out of the other room and asked, “Would you mind getting my adding machine?”

I went into the little office next to the kitchen, opened the top right drawer of the roll top desk, and pulled out the Lightening Adding Machine. Painted a metallic green, the machine had seven round dials in a horizontal row across the front. Each dial looked like a miniature telephone dial, and a brown stand held the machine in a slanted position. I found the metal pen and handed everything to Dad.

“Number 37,” Mom said.

She paused and said, “52,” which was the number of barrels the picker with number 37 tickets had picked.

“Boys,” Dad said, “he did good today.”

He took his metal pen and placed the point in one of the dial holes and twirled it around just like you would if you put your finger in a telephone dial and twirled it around to get the number you wanted. Then he twirled the one next to it to record 52.

He kept adding more and more barrel totals onto the machine. The total figure showed up in the slots above the dials. At the end of the tabulations, the top number on the machine—1,625—was the total of barrels picked that day.

“That was the best day we’ve had yet,” he said, pushing the machine back and folding his hands.

Mom wrote the number down in her spiral leather binder that listed, on lined pages, the pickers’ names and ticket numbers, the totals they picked each day, and grand totals during the season in barrels and hundredweight. A good day was around 1,200 barrels.

At the end of each work week, Mom multiplied the pickers’ totals by 25 cents—the going rate for a barrel of potatoes back then—and Dad handed out the checks.

Second page to the above harvest record.

Mom put away her binder on top of the desk. I put the cardboard box of ticket bundles on the enclosed porch. The next morning the pickers would see if our totals were right or if they thought they might have picked more and the tickets had blown off their barrels or somehow went missing.

Dad would be up before 5. If he thought it was going to rain, he’d be up earlier to hear the forecast, see if it had rained already, and answer any phone calls from workers wondering if we were going to dig. He’d also call the radio station to announce if he wasn’t digging because the ground was too wet.

Some farmers had started using mechanical harvesters, but Dad said machines bruised potatoes more than hand crews and he wanted perfect potatoes. He wasn’t planning on farming forever, and if he invested in new equipment, he wouldn’t get his money’s worth.

I couldn’t imagine Dad and Mom not farming and life not continuing like it had. I didn’t want anything to change, except me counting tickets faster and better, like the adults. (Originally published in Echoes, July-September, 2017.)

4th of July Pasture

Ant on red clover

It was the 4th of July and all our relatives had gone to the lake. All except us. Dad was a small potato farmer and if the plants were growing so fast that he could hardly keep up with the hoeing, he’d be out in the field on the John Deere, going as fast as he could. He promised that if he got done soon enough, we’d still head up for the cookout. 

Meanwhile, Mom had other ideas. The morning was cool and fresh, and I followed her to the old pasture that was spread out on a steep hill, about a half mile from the house.

The pasture had been part of a larger lot originally, deeded by the state to William Knight in the 1860s. A shoemaker from Hollis, with a wife and kids, Knight saw a chance at a better life by heading to the newly-opened, virgin lands of northern Maine where he was not beholdin' to anyone.

It's a mystery whether Knight, a Civil War vet, had anything to do with a story passed down about worn-out Civil War horses being marched up to that very land and made to stand around a long, deep hole. They were shot and pushed into that hole and buried there, we were told. But with no markers or written history of the event, all I knew for sure were the whispers of the lone 100-year-old tree that marked the border there between us and our neighbor's field of grain.

In the early days of farming, crops were planted on this land: potatoes, red clover; oats. But when tractors were made bigger, it was harder to harvest crops on such a hill. So the land was converted into pasture until the cattle were sold and the hill became a wild meadow where bears played and moose treaded in the brook below.

The old pasture held a special power over Mother, however, when there had been enough rain that spring and enough sun in early summer to produce wild strawberries.

Her instructions were brief.

“You spread the grass like so and look near the ground. If you see red, it’s either ripe berries or those red-leaves that fool you. Now go away from here. I’ve got a good patch and you have to find your own.”

After spreading the grass with my feet and wandering around, listening to birds singing in the nearby woods and watching white clouds sail by, I found my own patch. I could smell the sweetness of the berries before I saw them. They were so ripe that they almost fell into my hands as I placed them into the bowl Mom had given me. I ate a few and stepped on more and spilled some that the ants went after.

I was alone, it seemed, working for my own food, working where ever I wanted. I felt like the Knights might have felt when they, too, found their first good patch of strawberries on their own land.

When the sun was high and hot and we had enough berries, we hulled them at the house and Mom made a big pan of baking powder biscuits, mixed the berries with sugar, and whipped some cream. That night we had wild strawberry shortcake for dessert.

By then, I had forgotten about the lake. The cousins would’ve had cultivated berries for their shortcake, no doubt, bought from a store.

But these berries were free and sweeter than cultivated. And we were free to pick them again, someday--if we wanted to.