Peaches on the shelf
Potatoes in the bin
Supper’s ready, everybody come on in
Taste a little of the summer,
Taste a little of the summer,
You can taste a little of the summer
Grandma put it all in jars.
— Greg Brown, “Canned Goods”
Pat Burwell is telling me how to get to her house in Steens, but I’m not getting it.
“You know the Superette. Go from there toward Highway 12; we’re the first house on the right after the railroad tracks.”
Got it. About 2:15 Friday afternoon, frying pan hot, I’m turning off Steens Road onto a short gravel driveway leading to what at first glance looks like a sharecropper’s cabin, a beautifully cared for sharecropper’s cabin. It’s a low wooden structure painted reddish brown with a tin roof. The grass looks like a putting green; the clump of red cannas glows in the sunlight.
“Come on in,” Pat calls from the front door. By the time I get there, she’s halfway back to the kitchen. She’s ladling a scalding liquid the color of rose wine into 8-ounce jars. Jelly made with Phil Lancaster’s yellow and green plums from the farmers’ market. Earlier she produced a batch of jam with Lancaster’s peaches.
I take a seat at the counter. There’s a small dish of roasted almonds. She offers iced tea.
While she fills jars I take an inventory of the kitchen table: nine quarts of spiced green beans; 10 8-ounce jars of peach jam; 11 pints of bread-and-butter pickles; six bags of sugar.
It’s canning season for Pat Burwell; it started a week ago and will run until late August, early September when the muscadines ripen.
Burwell, 58, retired four years ago, a partner in a title company. Before that she was a paralegal with Gholson Hicks & Nichols. She and husband, Brooke, raised twin daughters, then moved to the country.
“This poor house was in ruins; it’s the old Blaylock home,” she says.
She and Brooke spent 10 years rebuilding it. It’s lovely inside, simple, lots of natural wood, homey.
“When I finish this batch, I want to show you the garden,” she says.
Normally, when she’s working in the kitchen, the music is cranked up: classical, blues, B.B. King. She was listening to the soundtrack to “Phenomenon” when I came in.
“You know, the John Travolta movie? It’s a great soundtrack.”
I make a note.
Burwell says she spends most of the week canning. “Amazing what you can get done when you’re retired,” she says.
“Oh, Lord no,” she answers my question about selling her canned goods. “I give it as gifts.”
She gets a lot of her raw materials at the farmers market and from neighbors.
“I try my best to support our local farmers,” she says.
During a break in the action — Burwell will make 30 pint jars of jelly this afternoon — we walk out in the backyard. Vegetables and flowers grow in three-foot-high raised beds made of cypress by across-the-road neighbor Richard Garmon. Everything is in apple-pie order.
As a newcomer to tomato growing, I was particularly taken with the Burwells’ method of staking. The tomato plants are lashed to an eight-foot section of cattle fencing supported by two 2x4s.
One of the highlights of the backyard is the chicken coop. The chickens have their own fan. Beside the coop is a covered area with a ceiling and two chairs.
“We call it chicken TV,” Burwell says. “They are so much fun to watch. Go buy about 200 crickets and watch them run. They love it. It’s the best therapy.”
There’s a lovely gazebo built by Corey Hudgens under a giant water oak. North of the house, the Burwells have planted a grove of sawtooth oaks, a tree favored for its bountiful acorn crop in early fall. With acorns come deer. More viewing pleasure.
When I get ready to go, Burwell escorts me to my truck carrying two plastic Piggly Wiggly bags filled with jars of canned goods, including a still warm jar of plum jelly.
“Nobody leaves my house empty-handed,” she says. “It gives me joy to give.”
Take us out, Greg …
She cans the pickles, sweet & dill
She cans the songs of the whippoorwill
And the morning dew and the evening moon
An’ I really got to go see her pretty soon.
Birney Imes III is the immediate past publisher of The Dispatch.
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