For the Love of Dirt: Cherry Eyeballs and Frozen Peaches

Saturday, August 29, 2020

Cherry Eyeballs and Frozen Peaches

1950 Grandma Isabella

Grandad Robert and Dad Davy

In the house on Fairfield , there was a root cellar in the basement. When I was growing up I used to believe I heard noises coming from it. I would walk by and feel the air move through the darkness.

My Grandmother loved that root cellar, when she and Grand dad lived with my parents in the '50s. She saw it as a lovely place to keep her preserves. Hundreds of processed jars, full of floating fruit.

My father, Davy, used to drive everyone in the old Dodge, to the Okanagon in the summer. They'd buy big flats of fruit, and then drive back home. Then they would can cherries and peaches in heavy glass mason jars, and stack them up on the shelves in the root cellar.

It was earthy, wormy, musty, in there. Spiders dangled in profusion from webs strung from the jars.No light except the one from the basement light bulb. And it didn't reach that far. After Grandmother died, those jars and jars of peaches and cherries seemed to settle in , like mummies....

No one ever opened them after she died. No one touched them. Till one day, years later (some 20 years later), I was sent down to get a jar of cherries and a jar of peaches. My mother wanted to see if they were still any good.....I had to put on gumboots in order to walk into the root cellar.

I stood on the threshold, the light swinging back and forth. There was something in there. I was sure of it. Something crunched underfoot. The cherries loomed. They looked like eyeballs. Gooey, gelatinous things. The peaches resembled fuzzy fingers drowning in amber liquid. Softly sluffing white dandruff from their edges.

Something scuttled into the corner. I couldn't tell if it was the resident garter snake , or the bony hand of a long dead Egyptian mummy come to life.......Grabbing a jar of cherries and a jar of peaches, I escaped to the light above, where it was safe. Where it didn't smell old.

Unfortunately, I don't believe my grandmother's cherries and peaches survived the test of time. They smelled ...bad...real bad.... I kind of wondered why my mother did not just get rid of the lot.

1955 Grandmother Isabelle and mum Nessie

I watched her as she poured the old fruit into a bowl, and she talked about her mother and the farm, and the old days. She talked a lot about those days. I think she missed them.

Many years later when I sold the the house , those same jars of peaches and cherries were still in the root cellar. I just left them there, cause that's where they belonged. It was their home. I couldn't get rid of them either.

And truth be told , I was just a little leery about those cherry eyeballs and peach fingers floating about in their glass tombs. Watching me. (And I always wondered about that garter snake...........I was sure it was still alive down there. Slithering in the dirt. ............)