ELDERBERRIES AND UNICORNS

Country living is bountiful in surprises, like elderberries. I only knew about elderberries because 

of our loved Les (now 98), who was always willingly to share his wonderful elderberry jam with all of the family. I did not know what he went through to get this interesting wild fruit until we added the Elderberry Jam project to our self-learning list.

The first step is to gather the berries along roadsides, creeks, and my favorite, an abundant growth along a railroad bed near us. Elderberries come to bloom in mid-July through August, but picking early is better because the competition for the fruit is intense. A multitude of birds, insects, little amphibians including shiny little snakes weaving among the bush branches also gather as soon as the hard red berry turns a soft deep purple.

On our first excursion in elderberry gathering we loaded the car with 5-gallon plastic buckets, heavy duty scissors, boots and rubber gloves, and a thermos of coffee. The blue-red blossom heads, each supporting dozens of berries are cut from the branches and dropped into the buckets to separate later at the convenience of home.

With rubber gloves on (avoiding determined elderberry stain on our hands) we rolled the berries off of the blossom heads into a large bowl to be crushed in another phase for the treasured jam. Joel and I worked together on this messy part of the task discussing the pleasing artistic form of the elderberry stems after the berries were removed and dreaming of the eventual sweet outcome of this fussing.

Deep into the process, elderberries sneaking past the rubber gloves staining our arms and clothes, porch and shoes, another life surprise cut through our concentrated senses. Jessie, who was just four at the time, was in the house with her sister and brother when she had an epiphany that demanded an answer. She swung the porch door open and forcefully called to Joel, “Dad! Where did all the unicorns go?”  blink      blink

Some questions just have no answers . . . yet.

Thank you for checking on this blog, the continuation of stories left out of A Homestead Decade How Crunchy Granola Changed My Life, Amazon Kindle, $2.99.  We hope you keep checking back because there is a lot more to come.

Helene

After the Book

My 94 year old Aunt Genevieve used to ask me about raising goats and chickens. She would laugh at the stories, commanding me even to the last week of her life, to write the stories down and share that intriguing part of our life.  That was the get-serious motivation to write, A Homestead Decade – How Crunchy Granola Changed My Life. I say get-serious because it was always one of those someday things we carry around in our to-do lists.

I was also motivated by the new world of the e-book and the ease of facilitating an outlet for such a book. Crunchy Granola, our shortcut to talk about the memoir, is now available on Amazon Kindle Books for a meager $2.99. We are grateful for the wonderful comments received about the book, yet we are also haunted by so much that was left out in our excited haste to get the thing done.

Therefore, in this new fantastic world of e! , we can continue the story and comments about “back-to-the-land” movements, then and now, through a web log. Join us as we see just where the blog takes us. It should be another intriguing journey of its own.

One such story is associated with getting water in and out of the house. I don’t find this topic discussed very often except in trade journals for plumbers and backhoe services. Not that these trade journals are easily accessible to me.

While we were building our homestead house, we planned for a 4” well to obtain water. Only one well-driller in the county had the equipment for such a wide pipe. We were told he was also a dowser, he could find water anywhere using the ancient dowser trick of grasping the forked ends of a branch in his hands and “feeling” the vibration of water from the point of the branch as the point dipped downward pointing to the source of water. Uh-huh. 

So we hired Mr. B to come find a good water source and drill a fine well for us. Well, Mr. B came on a Sunday evening after dinner dressed in his Sunday duds, a woman sat in the truck waiting for him. He sliced a forked branch of a young wild cherry grumbling a bit to himself about no willows on the property. Dowsing rod in position he began walking slowly over the land surrounding the house. We followed trying to see the point of the stick around his large body. In a moment of anticipating some country magic we heard a grand almost musical fart burst through Mr. B’s aura. Joel glanced at me wide eyed before he began to laugh out loud. Mr. B was not fazed. He continued walking over the building site up the western slope through briars and mud at the edge of the trees finally declaring “There it is.”

What? No shimmy on the stick, not even a downward point? And look at the spot, Joel protested, the unprepared west side of the house, up a hill, in the woods! There was no way we could get a big well drilling rig up there. By some dowsing mystery, Mr. B rather quickly “found” water on the flatter south side of the property, where he eventually dug our well 80’down. Now that was a powerful dowsing rod.

 
So goes the stories of our country living. I am hoping to have some fun with this blog sharing stories and recipes and comments on the desire to live in the country. If you would like to take a look at the book, A Homestead Decade – How Crunchy Granola Changed My Life, you can read a sample chapter free on www.Amazon.com Kindle Books. Or better yet, just order a copy for your Kindle or PC or smartphone. Cheap. And it’s a fast and funny read. Let me know what you think.

Helene