ChapterXI,1966,The Later Months,Continued.

The making of wine was hardly my mothers first foray into growing,harvesting and bottling our own fruit.She had a garden in the back yard,and it's very early on that I can recall her gathering up all the old bottles,sterilizing them in a big pot of boiling water,then cutting up,and grinding up thins to put into them.

In early summer,before the first of July,canning season would start with strawberries.we usually picked our own berries at a self picking farm,as there was not near enough room in the backyard for a strawberry patch.We'd bring them home,and out would come every bottle in the house,to be boiled inside and out.We usually didn't use Mason Jars,purchased for bottling,but instead,old instant coffee,or Cheez Whiz bottles,or any jar laying around the house.My mother would cut up the berries,and boil them down with whatever secret ingredients she used,until the whole house was filled with the smell of strawberries,and it drifted out into the yard.She'd work late into the night sometimes,after were were in bed,and when we woke up the next day,there would be dozens of bottles of strawberry jam, still warm and sitting on the kitchen counter.My mother would serve us jam with our toast at breakfast. Later on,she would usually make bread,and we would have jam with fresh buns for dinner.To this day,the smell,and the taste of fresh strawberry jam,and warm baked bread,are the taste and smell of home to me.

Out in the garden,my mother grew a lot of cucumbers,and beans,both green and yellow.These she used to bottle up later in the summer.Sometimes she would just slice up the cucumbers,then pickle them in vinegar and a lot of salt,so,when it was time to eat them,they just came out of the bottle like sliced cucumbers,only smaller.They tasted good too.Not at all like cucumbers,which is a thing I've never really acquired a taste for.Pickles were completely different-all tangy and salty,and I very much enjoyed them.Sometimes she would take out this metal grinder she had,and grind up the cucumbers along with other ingredients.This usually included onions and green and red peppers,as well as some various spices.This is the way in which I first encountered peppers,and I distinctly remember that experience.Peppers were not something we grew in our garden,nor were they ordinarily something that was kept in the house at the time.My mother,being a United Empire Loyalist,was not especially into the kinds of food you would use peppers in.In fact,I think that her idea of ethnic food was limited to Irish Stew and French Fries.But,when she was  making the kind of pickles you grind up,then use as hot dog relish,she used both green and red peppers.Her recipe might well have called for other kinds of peppers as well,but she was hardly that adventurous,and I don't recall that the hotter varieties of peppers were even available in any store in Moncton. It's not like there were many ethnic food stores around at the time.

So I was standing in the kitchen,watching my mother grind up cucumbers.Nothing new about that.But then she had these kind of misshapen round things that kind of looked like apples,except that they were waxy looking and had a tough,fibrous stem growing from the top of them.As my mother ground up the cucumbers,she allowed me to smell them.They were a rather subtle smelling thing,not overpowering at all.If she ground up onion,I could smell them too,from almost anyplace in the house.I rather liked them smell of onions too.But when it came to the peppers,my mother encouraged me not to sniff at them."You won't like them" she said,and I wondered how she could be so certain. The green ones seemed be okay,though they made my eyes water a bit.Not like being right over top of a ground onion though.When she ground up the red ones,she shooed me away,telling me they were really hot,that they would burn up my nose and make me cry,worse than onions ever could.So I watched her grind them up from the other side of the kitchen,and I still wanted to see what they smelled like.So I waited for her to go into some other room,then went up and sniffed the bowl full of ground red peppers.I'd had a certain expectation of how they might smell,based on my mother saying that they were hot,and on the fact that they were red.But they didn't smell anything like I thought they might.They didn't make my eyes water either,so I stuck my finger into the bowl and tasted some of the peppers.It had an unusual sort of tang to it,but it wasn't at all what I'd call unpleasant.A tiny bit hot,but,more than anything,quite sweet.But,once the pickles were all made,I couldn't really find that taste in them at all.It was as if it just disappeared into the taste of pickles,which was alright by me. I'm also quite certain that it was my mothers first encounter with peppers too.I'm certain she would have never told me they were hot  and nasty,if she'd known that they were not.Where she grew up,I'd never known anyone to grow peppers,and I'd never even seen one in a grocery store. So what possessed her to use them in the first place is something I can only guess at.She always used to tell us years later that it was important to follow recipes precisely ,to the letter,so,perhaps she found a pickle recipe and did exactly that,though it was likely an adventure for her to have done so.Most likely she had her own expectations of how such exotic plants would smell and taste.And most likely those expectations were wrong.She likely knew,too,about pickles never tasting exactly like the things you put in them,so this likely permitted her to be obedient to the recipe without being too bold.

Later in the year,we would go get apples from a roadside stand,and my mother would make bottles of apple jelly,some apple pie,and,my favorite,apple cobbler made with apples and brown sugar. Sometimes we would find apples in other places too.There were wild apples growing both around the cottage,and at my grandparents place in western New Brunswick.That's where we would go to pick apples.But,as it turned out,not all apples are created equal.Some of them were apples you could eat,some you could turn into a pie or apple jelly,and some were just better left alone. I could never really go near an apple tree without tasting the fruit,which I guess is how I've been able to tell I'm fully human.In my grandparents yard,there used to be an apple tree.there were others up in the woods too.But when I asked my mother if they were good to eat,she said no,and she called them pig apples.The only thing they ever used those apples for was to feed pigs.But sure enough I got into the pig apples.And I remember both my mother and father saying"Well,they ought to keep him close to home for a while at least.".This was something that I couldn't really figure out,since in The Bible,eating apples was the thing that seemed to get Adam and Eve run out of their home.But I wasn't long learning that pig apples really did keep me close to home,no farther away than the front yard,until they ran their course. 

Chapter XI,1966,The Later Months,Continued

Our time at the cottage came to an end,and we headed home.As far as I know,my father got his wish,and his children were tanned like...chocolate.So we returned to Moncton and the routine of our lives.Some days we were off to the babysitter's house,some days we stayed home,if my father was not working.It was a time of playing outside with friends,all summer long,or,if the weather was bad ,staying in and watching afternoon movies,which served to do nothing except reinforce all the bad attitudes I was developing about Germans,and Indians-since war movies and westerns were my favorite afternoon entertainment.Secretly,though,I really wanted to meet the German lady who lived next to our cottage.But I never did.

When we got home,we dragged along my mothers huge quantity of cherries,which were destined to become homemade wine.I really don't know why my mother wanted to brew wine,because she was never much of a drinker.My father drank beer,but she would never touch it.Nobody ever kept wine in the house,so far as I know.If out at a social function,my mother would accept a drink if offered,but only one.She felt compelled to do so out of politeness.The same applied to cigarettes.But aside from that,she pretty much had a hard line church approach to alcohol,even though the church we attended could hardly be called hard line.But the idea of making wine seemed a bit of a surprise.Later,when it occurred to me that church and wine making were not exactly separable concepts,it took on an even darker meaning.

As far as I could tell,making wine involved crushing up a whole lot of cherries into this big earthenware crock,and pouring in huge quantities of sugar.The crock then sat downstairs,right beside the furnace,where it was rather hot and dry.After a while,it began to take on a rather rotten odor,and if I was down in the basement,I steered clear of it.I really couldn't figure out why anyone would want to drink what was in that crock. After it had been there for maybe a couple of weeks,my mother strained it through a piece of cheesecloth into another crock.But first she scooped out this film of greenish brown mold that had grown across the top of the cherries.When she had originally mashed down the fruit,she had not bothered to remove the pits.This she allowed to be done by the cheesecloth.And then the crock was left to sit for the furnace for what seemed like a very long time,and I would try hard to stay away from it.Eventually,after straining the wine though cloth several more times,my mother poured it out into big jars,kind of like those very large pickle jars.So,the wine was finally made,but I don't remember ever seeing anyone drinking it.I do recall.though,that several weeks later,some of the wine became part of a misadventure that was bound to go down in my family's legends.   

Chapter XI,1966,The Later Months,Continued.

It turned out that there was a lot to see and do at our cottage.We were located on the Northumberland Strait, more or less across from Charlottetown,Prince Edward Island.On clear days you could see all the way across.With a pair of binoculars,you could even see some of the farmers fields,with their red mud.There was an Island out into the strait a bit too,that kind of looked like a beaver.It turns out that the island was called Saddle Island,and a few years later,I had occasion to visit there.In the near distance,there yet another island,called Oak Island.This is not,the more famous Oak Island where there is said to be buried Pirates treasure.Or at least it's not the one that people have been digging up for years to find that treasure.This Oak Island is very much intact,with no deep holes dug into it's surface anywhere.What is unique about it though,is that at low tide,it.s really not an island at all.When the water recedes,it is connected to the mainland,and you can walk across to the island.There are tidal pools that you have to walk through,but they're not deep,and the distance is short enough that there is plenty of time to get there and back before the tide comes back in.

We took a few walks over to the island while we stayed at the cottage,and along the way we got to learn a lot about life along the shoreline.There were plenty of creatures there,and a lot of them were good to eat,so we would be out on the sand flats between the island and the mainland digging up clams.Usually we would dig them with an empty half clam shell,but sometimes with a shovel too.There was a kind of clam that you had to be careful digging because it was long and had very sharp edges.This clam was called a razor clam,for reasons that would be totally obvious if you were ever to see one.Lots of times I've cut my hands trying to dig one out of the sand.There were also crabs laying about in the sand.Most were small.not large enough to eat,and nobody I knew at the time ever bothered with eating crabs anyway,because lobster was easily available,not nearly as expensive as it is today,and considered to be much better than crab. The gulls would eat crabs,though.Gulls would eat just about anything,even our garbage,if we didn't take it to the dump every few days.I found out too,that gulls had a unique way of opening clams.If they could not pry a clam open with their beak,they would fly above some rocks with the clam,then drop it onto the stones,smashing the shell to pieces.My mother pointed this out to us the first time we were walking over to the island.

If you stood facing the water,on the opposite side from the island was a long finger of land called Smith's point.Together with the point on the island,they formed a sheltered cove,and our cottage was at the deepest part of the cove.So it was ideal for swimming in.The water in the Northumberland Strait is quite warm in summer,and,by midsummer the jellyfish have completed their migrations,so it's a good place to pass a summer afternoon.The beach right in front of our cottage was fairly rocky,but we could find lots of nice sand without having to walk too far.So we spent lots of time in the water over that two weeks.

Up the road a ways,there was a berry patch.Mostly it was a big bramble patch with a lot of raspberries,but there were some other things growing in there too.All the time we were there we were picking raspberries,and eating them for dinner.But my mother had in mind to pick some wild cherries too,because she wanted to try making some homemade wine.There were not a lot of cherry trees,but the ones that were there were loaded with fruit,and it didn't take long to fill up buckets.The cherries were not really much good to eat,being among the sourest things I've ever tasted,but my mother thought that it wouldn't matter,since the recipe for wine called for a lot of sugar.

Over our time at the cottage ,there are two events in particular that stand out in my mind.The first involved a very big surprise just after breakfast one morning.The second was a misadventure on my part.In fact,it was among the worst things I've ever done in my life,and I should have gotten into deep trouble for it.But I didn't.

One morning,just as we were all finishing up breakfast,we heard a loud,a very loud noise outside.It was the unmistakable sound of a helicopter,but it was very nearby.Much closer and louder than any helicopter I'd ever heard before.When we went out into the yard,we saw that the helicopter,the kind with two big rotors,was in fact flying right along the beach at about tree top level.And it was enough to make all the dishes rattle on the table.Of course,it had attracted a fair bit of interest from all of the cottagers,and everyone wondered where it was going.But it was quite clear that it's intent was to land nearby.My father wondered if it was in trouble.He also recognized it as being a Canadian military helicopter.As it turned out,it landed at the very next cottage to our.The one on the opposite side from where the German lady lived-they were not invading.Once it set down,some men emerged,then brought a stove and a refrigerator out from inside the helicopter,and took it inside our neighbors cottage.He was having the appliances delivered from Halifax.So we all got to see a military helicopter up close.

Sometime before we went to the cottage,my father had bought a new car.It was a very large car,as cars tended to be back in that day,and it had a lot of bells and whistles.For one thing,it had power windows,and,when you are five years old,you can have a lot of fun playing power window wars while sitting in the car.But power windows were not the only thing this car had.It had a huge ashtray,with a built in cigarette lighter,a feature which my father loved.No more fumbling with matches while trying to keep the car on the road.One rather rainy day just before the end of our stay at the cottage,I was sitting in the car with my little sister.I was trying to play power window wars but she didn't seem to get the point of the game,being a year younger than I was.I was also messing around with the lighter,and this my sister was interested in.She wanted to know what it did,and I really could only think of one way to show her.So I pushed the lighter in and waited for it to pop back out.Of course,I knew it was hot,but I'm not certain she did.So I'm sitting there with the lighter,and she is trying to get a closer look.And I really don't know what got into me,but I'm encouraging her to touch the lighter.I wasn't really trying to be mean,but it was a terrible thing to do.Really,I never thought that she would touch the lighter.But she did.She touched it and she burned her finger,and ran off screaming.Right away I felt bad.I knew it was a bad thing that I'd done.I really hadn't intended to hurt anyone,but I had.Surely I was going to get in trouble.Surely I'd end up going to Hell for what I'd done.I was never as afraid of Hell as I was at that moment.A few time afterwards I even had bad dreams about that.When my parents found out I expected to get into a lot of trouble.But that never happened,and I really couldn't understand why.I'd done a terribly wrong thing,and justice demanded that I get into trouble.But they just seemed to write it off as an accident,and we were not allowed to play in the car after that.But it started to dawn on me that my parents were not always capable of delivering perfect justice,or knowing fully what was going on all of the time.In the end,I suppose I got my justice,because it is not easy fearing the possibility of Hell.I carried that around for me for a long time,even into adulthood,but it helped me see too,that people really do have a sin nature,that we do bad things even when we don't really want to,or intend to.The age of five is a young age to come face to face with that reality,but that's what happened.And my parents didn't understand what happened.It would have been better if they had,because I've carried most of that alone,and I've wished that I didn't have to.