Peach orchard reverie

Stratford peaches in the bag, new ones, a lemon, plus the
essential ingredient of a morning drive into the country.

Peach cobbler season... fresh juicy delicious Stratford peaches from the Edmond Farmer's Market last Saturday. Fourth of July coming up...perhaps not enough for an entire cobbler for about eight people.

I call father-in-law Jay Henry about driving to Harrah to get more peaches from the orchard he's visited for years. He calls and finds the orchard is open at 8 a.m., so I drive across town to get him about 7:15, and off we go, through the morning rush  hour traffic, till we turn off I-35 into the morning sun on 23rd Street....

Into a different world. Yes, Choctaw commuters are passing us heading west to work in OKC. Soon though, the four lane gets quieter, over rolling hills, past places I want to stop and take photos of, but I don't have a camera, and we're heading to peaches.

North on Luther Road, past new houses, into the quiet countryside. Hay fields, soybeans, corn, horses in yards, blackberry orchards, peach orchards. We arrive at the gate just as it's opening, and our tires crunch down the gravel road into the 300 acres of so of orchard on rolling hills. On both sides are peach trees, many of them only a couple of years old, others already picked. Signs mark rows marked  as to varieties...Redskin, Topaz, more than I can remember. A hail storm two years ago devastated the orchard, Jay says, and it's just now recovering.

We stop and ask where to pick, and get directions from teenagers working the stand. Half bushel paper cartons to put our pickings in. $30 if they're full. Most of the peaches we see are small and not ripe, and where we're supposed to pick is a disappointment...hard and not tasty. We see other pickers and stop and ask, and eventually get about a quarter of a bushel...small, just getting ripe.

Not what either of us had envisioned, but they go in the back of the car and we wend our way home through the backroads, past cemeteries, more fields of hay and soybeans and corn and more...a peaceful, rural way of life only minutes from the madness of morning metropolis. Back to his home, and I pick out just a few peaches to add to my cobbler brew. They're smaller than the Stratford, and not quite as tasty, but by 10 a.m. I'm back in Edmond. I slice up a few, licking the juice off my fingers, thinking about cobbler...my recipe and others'. 

I know one essential ingredient has already been added...a morning conversation of memories and sights that will add flavor to the cobbler.

Barn yet again

15 by 22, watercolor, 300 pound d'Arches paper--Oklahoma county barn

Turning the pages of the first half of 2012

"One Hundred Years of Marriage" by Louise Farmer Smith (See the previous post) is book 12 of those read as the first half of the year comes to a close.  I thought I was behind, on one a month, but no. It's been an interesting reading

The two most previous books I've read are "Repetitions" by Doris Cohen about reincarnation,  and "Mack to the Rescue," Jim Lehrer's satire set in Oklahoma, with a one-eyed assistant governor who reminds me of George Nigh, and a whacko governeor who reminds me of Frank Keating. I know I'm late started reading these, but it was signed by the author, bought at Full Circle Book Store. http://www.fullcirclebooks.com/ Neat use of place names, for anyone who knows Oklahoma.  He makes up a couple of places, but I only found one error--aint' ever gonna be a Walmart in Waurika.

Just before that, I've read "Sagebrush and Paintbrush" about Charles Russell by Nancy Plain. I bought it in Fort Worth in the spring, visiting with my brother and the watercolor show at the Amon Carter. It's really a children's book, but I stll learned from it. And I bought and red the museum book with the show, "Romance Maker" by Rick Stewart, about Russell and showing the watercolor paintings. What you do learn though is that no printing can approach the grandeur of the original art.

About the same time was "After Custer," by Paul Hedrin, the winner of the Wrangler Award at the Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum, that I judged in nonfiction. The Oklahoma connect is that it's printed by the OU Press...and I've mentioned it in my current story on the OU Press in Oklahoma today, "Pressing On."

Here's the lead: "Custer was dead, and Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull and Morning Star were desperate." Paul Hedren's Wrangler-Award winning book, "After Custer, Loss and transformation in Sioux country. The Oklahoma connection--published by the OU press. Great reading. Makes you sad and ashamed of what white people did to the Indians in the name of "civilization."

• Before that were two poetry books by Oklahoma authors, reviewed here earlier    "Red Fields," and "Subterranean Red." http://clarkcoffee.blogspot.com/2012/04/red-dirt-blood-titles-and-words.html
• In January I posted the reviews of Tony Hillerman's "Seldom Disappointed" and Friedman's "That Used To Be Us." http://clarkcoffee.blogspot.com/2012/01/freedom-failure-turning-pages-in.html I've also reread M. Scott Momaday's book, "In the Bear's House," one evening, sitting on the back porch, and it gave me ideas of the convesation posts between a geezer and God in March. http://clarkcoffee.blogspot.com/2012/03/geezer-and-god.html
• And there's the landmark "The River White" by Ken Hada of Ada and his brother Duane in Arkansas, reviewed here on the blog also. http://clarkcoffee.blogspot.com/2012/01/rhythm-of-water-review.html
• I'd have to rank "The River White" and Hillerman as the favorite reads so far, just because of my personal interests.
• I have to thank Jeanetta Calound Mish of Mongrel Empire Press who introduced me to many of these authors. http://www.mongrelempire.org 

Why did your mother say "Yes"?

When I opened the mailbox the other day, there was this package, hand addressed to me, with the same delicate handwriting on the return, from a woman in Washington, D.C.
Inside was a paperback book "One Hundred Years of Marriage," and a handwritten note from the author, Louise Farmer Smith, a native Oklahoman.
Her note explained that we were meeting because of Jeanetta Calhoun Mish, publisher, poet and friend whose books from Mongrel Empire Press  I've reviewed here before.
Farmer's book, a novel in stories, is set in Oklahoma and springs from two questions she asks in her note to the reader: "What was your father thinking the night he proposed? Why did she say yes?"

What fuel for the imagination. 

She starts in 1960 and goes back in generations of the same family into the 1800s before returning to 1979 in the last of six stories--a Michneresque structure, complete with a family lineage chart.  You can see more about it at Amazon. http://www.amazon.com/One-Hundred-Years-Marriage-Stories/dp/1468173758

Farmer, a descendant of pioneer dugout dwellers in Oklahoma, is an author with degrees from OU and Yale, says these are fiction, but the characters are such real Okies, you know she knew people like them. It's all the more real because of her detail of Oklahoma landscape and college town.

It's not a happy book, nor sad, but raw and realistic, sometimes disturbing because it's so real about ordinary Okies, their matches and mismatches, with humor offsetting some of the darkness. I think one reason it jars me is that all our families have had versions of these dramas somewhere in our lives. I was captivated  at the first story, "The House After It Was Leveled--1960." It's narrated by the oldest college age daughter about her mother going through menopause. Consider the first sentence: "I looked like the four of us might eat supper without talking about Mother's condition, ....," You have to keep reading, don't you?
A couple of favorite phrases from that first story:

"Dust swept up from the new flowerbeds and swirled around the foundation of the building. I hoped from the bottom of my heart that she would pour out everything."

"At night I law awake, noticing how our house sounded. ...but now the house itself made a kind of wheeze every once in a while like it was remembering the time before it was level."

I'm halfway through, and I admit, I have to catch my breath after each story. The stories remind me of the old black and white photos of families through the years, but with flesh and emotion oozing out of them.

Edmond Car show, Liberty Fest...What a treat

68 photos on this link
http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.3873084479512.153958.1650664031&type=1&l=7fe6657fce