Apples in Winter

Orchard at Sabbathday Lake Shaker Village, New Gloucester, Maine, December 1, 2018

I grew up on a New England farm that, like so many others in the region, had an abundance of old apple trees. In addition to trees along all the stone walls that border the fields and pastures, there was, in times past, a decent-sized orchard on the property. This plentitude was matched by the diversity of varieties present. A map of the orchard (reproduced below), drawn by either my grandfather, Darwin, or great-grandfather, Alexius, indicates approximately 200 trees, of nearly 50 varieties. I shall return to the subject of the family orchard in a bit.

This strong presence of apples in my early life has given me a deep, sentimental fascination with apples and old apple trees. At times it seems as though the trees have a living spirit or personality of their own. They stand, silent and unmoving, as they have for perhaps a century or more, voiceless witnesses to decades of change in the social and economic worlds around them. Their character is especially revealed in winter when the leaves are gone and we see the venerable old things in all their crooked, twisty splendor. The fruit of some varieties clings to the branches well into early winter, as is the case with those pictured here that stand in the orchard at Sabbathday Lake Shaker Village in New Gloucester, Maine. This gives one the sense that the trees are refusing to yield to the change of seasons but want to retain the past summer's bounty for as long as possible. I take this as a lesson in persistence. How very Shaker-like.

I am far from alone in my fascination with old apples. In the past generation, as the number of varieties of apples readily available in American supermarkets has shrunk to a predictable half-dozen or so--and many of these either newish types (Honeycrisp) or imports (Braeburn and Gala from New Zealand, and Fuji from Japan)--interest in older, "heirloom" varieties has grown. One of the champions of heirloom apples is John Bunker, from Palermo, Maine. Bunker has established an orchard on his property and runs a CSA devoted to heritage apples. Bunker also founded Fedco Trees which has become a major source of trees for those--like me!--who want to try their hand at raising heirloom apples. The Fedco website is an important source of information about older apple varieties, one that I turn to frequently.

It's impossible to know just how many different types of apples were once grown in this country--I have seen estimates as high as 16,000--but the ±50 varieties in the family orchard is probably a fairly typical number for many older New England farms. A big reason for the bewildering diversity is the nature of apples themselves; if left to their own devices apple seeds don't reproduce replicas of the trees they came from. Apples are "extreme heterozygotes," meaning that they reproduce with unpredictable characteristics. If you have a type of apple that you like and want to be able to keep growing more with the same traits, you have to do so via grafting (i.e., cloning). But their heterozygosity(!) makes it possible to cultivate many different varieties, each with its own attributes. By the same token, if orchardists and nursery owners stop cultivating particular types they will become extinct. Hence the importance of the work of Bunker and Fedco.

While some Biblical scholars suggest that it would be more appropriate for the tree in the tale of Adam and Eve's expulsion from the Garden of Eden in Judeo-Christian mythology to be identified as a fig rather than an apple, the cultivation of apples is, in fact, thousands of years old. Apples may well have been the first fruit tree to be cultivated, beginning in what is today Kazakhstan. It is said that apples were introduced to England during the reign of Julius Caesar. Colonists from Britain brought them to the New World early in the 17th century. 

Orchard at Sabbathday Lake Shaker Village, New Gloucester, Maine, May 16, 2019

New England has, and has not, been a good home for apples. Apples' versatility made them a welcome and valued commodity to self-sufficient Yankees. They're great for baking, for making juice, cider, or vinegar, and--perhaps best of all--for fresh eating right off the tree. In addition to their value for human consumption, apples can be fed to livestock; cows, horses, and pigs are all fond of them. But with the rise of industrialization in the 19th century, and the concomitant migration of New England farmers westward in search of more fertile and less rocky farmland, hundreds of farms in the region were abandoned. Acres and acres of once-cleared land reverted to scrub and forest, effectively swallowing up the old stone walls that had formed the boundaries of hayfields and pastures. And, with the walls, the untended apple trees that grow alongside them. 

"Cider Making," William Sidney Mount, Metropolitan Museum of Art

Henry David Thoreau wrote eloquently about the apples of New England. He termed the apple "the noblest of all fruits," and felt that "the flowers of the apple are perhaps the most beautiful of any tree's, so copious and delicious to both sight and scent." However, old Henry was not a fan of the cultivation of apples; he much preferred those that grew wild:

Apples for grafting appear to have been selected commonly, not so much for their spirited flavor, as for their mildness, their size, and bearing qualities--not so much for their beauty as for their fairness and soundness. Indeed, I have no faith in the selected lists of pomological gentlemen. Their 'Favorites' and 'Non-suches' and 'Seek-no-farthers,' when I have found them, commonly turn out very tame and forgettable. They are eaten with comparatively little zest, and have no real tang or smack to them. 

He would not have been impressed by today's movement to save carefully cultivated heirloom varieties! Thoreau also had a fondness for apples that went unharvested:

Apples in overgrown orchard at Laudholm Farm, Wells, Me

The time for wild apples is the last of October and the first of November. Then they get to be palatable, for they ripen late and they are still perhaps as beautiful as ever. I make a great account of these fruits, which the farmers do not think it worth the while to gather--wild flavors of the Muse, vivacious and inspiriting. The farmer thinks that he has better in his barrels, but he is mistaken[.] 

But cultivate apples Yankee farmers certainly did. The orchard on my family's farm was probably fairly typical in terms of size and of the diversity of varieties grown in it. A treasure found among the stash of family documents that came to me when my father passed away and we dispersed the contents of the farm house, is a map of the orchard with a key to the types, location, and quantity of the trees it contained (a typescript of the list is included at the end of this post):

The map raises a few questions. The layout of the trees does not really conform to the configuration of the terrain. The back side of the orchard (the left side of the diagram) was defined by the stone wall that marks the boundary between our place and that of the neighbor's so it was, in fact, straight, as shown on the map. But the front (the right side of the chart) more or less followed the contours of a brook and pond; no straight edges there. A real mystery is the indication of a spring--barely visible on the image here--on the far left side of the map, between the 4th and 5th rows down from the top. There has not been a spring anywhere near that location in my lifetime. Did one perhaps dry up? Is that even a possibility?  One should perhaps view this not as a precise, literal map of the orchard but as a stylized representation of it, of the nature of a schematic drawing. 

I wish I knew more about when the orchard was created, and how much my ancestors might have worked it as a commercial enterprise, or about what other use(s) they might have made of its bounty. Did they make and sell cider? Was there a local market where they sold apples? Did they use any of them for feed for livestock? One thing I do know is that my grandfather exhibited apples at the local fair; I wrote about his produce exhibits in an earlier post. Late in his life my father, Francis, wrote a series of short reminiscences about growing up on the farm in the early 20th century. He included a bit about his own father's apple exhibits:

As our farm then had many apple trees and many varieties, my father spent much time getting ready to exhibit them. He would take many plates of them and also a group of 49 which were in a diamond shape. Some of the varieties were Baldwins, Russetts, Northern Spy, Sweet Russetts, Golden Sweets, Orange Sweets, Sops of Wine, Winesaps, Pippins (a very large apple), Seek-No-Furthers, Sheeps Noses, and a variety which we always called “Good Kind” for want of a better name.

I can remember only one year in which my father harvested and sold apples from the orchard, though my older brothers recall him doing so in earlier times. I was quite young the year I'm thinking of...maybe not even in school. One of my father's older brothers, my Uncle Carl, and his wife, Lucille, were on hand to help. The adults climbed up into the trees on special ladders to pick the ripe apples, or to shake the branches so the fruit would fall on the ground. The apples were going to be sold to make cider so a few bumps and bruises were not fatal to their marketability. It was the job of us younger ones to fill baskets with the fallen fruit, then carry the baskets to the truck where an adult would transfer them to a crate. Picking up apples was the first job on the farm that I ever got paid for--a whopping 10¢ an hour! 

When we had enough crates to make a truck load my father hauled them to a railroad yard in Shelburne Falls, about 20 miles away, where they were loaded into boxcars. It was a big treat for my older sister and me to get to ride along--quite the adventure! I really enjoyed watching the trains coming and going in the yard, and counting the cars on the ones that rolled on through. My memories of this are quite dim, but wonderfully pleasant.

A few years later, probably around the time that I was in 5th or 6th grade, my father had all the trees in the orchard bulldozed to make more open land for pasture and cultivation. This was a big disappointment to me as the orchard had always been a favorite part of the wonderful extended playground that was the farm. There was a bit of a trade-off however--the piles of trees pushed up by the 'dozer made a terrific fort/castle/jungle gym for crawling around in! They eventually rotted away, of course, but lasted just about long enough for me to outgrow the fun of playing in them.

Although the orchard at the farm is long gone, there are still quite a few apple trees standing alongside the stone walls. Age has claimed some, and those that remain have seen better days. But they persist. One venerable Gravenstein tree at the lower end of the field we call the Square Lot holds particular memories for me. Gravensteins are prized as one of the very best pie apples, and as such were held in high esteem by my father. (He was famous for saying "the only thing better than a piece of apple pie is two pieces.") Every fall he would come to me and say, "Paul, I have a little job I need your help with." He'd hand me a basket or pail and together we'd make the short trek across the pasture to the site of the Gravenstein tree; it was something of the nature of a pilgrimage. Pop would climb up into the tree, carefully pick the ripe apples, and toss them down to me to put in the basket. There was no shaking these precious fruits onto the ground!

One often-overlooked benefit of having lots of apple trees around is the recreational opportunities they provide for young farm kids. Climbing them is an obvious possibility. The low branches on most apple trees are not so high up that a kid can't grab onto one and pull himself up into it. Once up in the tree there are plenty more branches to sit on, swing from, or use as ladders to climb even higher.  

Then there were apple fights, the late summer counterpart to winter snowball fights! I can't begin to tell you how many pitched battles we had with friends, cousins, and siblings. We'd just gather up a handful or two of partially-ripe apples and peg them at each other. Yes, they stung when they hit--yeeeowwch!--especially when thrown by bigger and stronger older brothers. But nobody ever got seriously hurt. I don't think.

A more benign activity, and one that required a certain amount of skill, was Apple Throwing; i.e., using a supple stick as a quasi-catapult to hurl apples for distance. This is best done with apples that are about half mature. We'd go into the woods, pocket knives in hand, cut two or three small saplings, maybe 3'-4' long, and sharpen one end of each in order to impale an apple on it. Selecting a stick that was just the right thickness, with just the right degree of flexibility, and then trimming it to just the right length, was a bit of an art. Additional skill was needed to push the apple onto the sharpened tip just far enough so it would not come off prematurely, but not so far that it wouldn't come off at all. Then, using either an overhand or sidearm technique, you'd reach waaaay back, whip the stick rapidly forward, and, with a well-timed flick of the wrist, send the apple flying across the field. If all the variables of suppleness, stick length, apple weight, throwing power, and technical prowess, were in perfect balance, your apple would go whistling through the air at a great rate--far enough, one hoped, that it would clear the stone wall on the opposite side of the field. Or at least travel as far as your older brother's did. 

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Apples. You can eat them. You can grind them up and drink them. You can bake them in pies and other goodies. You can market them. You can revel in the beauty of their blossoms, with your nose as well as your eyes. You can burn apple wood to make other things taste and smell great. You can feed them to your livestock. You can play games with them. You can climb the trees. As Thoreau said:

"It is remarkable how closely the history of the apple tree is connected with that of man."

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The title of this post, and the photographs of the trees in the orchard at Sabbathday Lake Shaker Village that grace the top of the page, were both inspired by the traditional Irish jig, "Apples in Winter." This is actually a "floating" title--i.e., one that in oral tradition has been linked with several different melodies. I offer here notation for the one that in my experience is most often associated with the title. You can hear it played beautifully by my friend Fergal Scahill, of the group, We Banjo 3.

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List of apple varieties formerly in the orchard at the family farm. Numbers after the names presumably indicate the number of trees of each variety. Some of the handwriting is very difficult to decipher. I do not know who drew the map and compiled the list. The list is not in my father's handwriting so it probably was done by either my grandfather, Darwin Wells (1869-1948), or his father, Alexius Wells (1828-1909). Note that there are also two pear trees indicated (nos. 43 and 44). These were likely the source of the pears that Darwin is known to have exhibited at the local fair; see my earlier post about the Cummington Fair. I have added a few small annotations.

1. Greening -- 29 2. Roxbury Russett – 19* 3. Seeknofurther -- 5 4. Sweet Russett -- 6 5. Family Apple – 9 6. Vandiver – 3 7. Nursery – 3 8. Spitsenburg [sic] – 11 9. Sops of Wine – 2 10. Fall Pippin – 7 11. Lady Finger Pairmain [Pearmain] – 4 12. Juneating – 3 13. Baldwin – 23 14. Gravenstein – 2 3  15. Spur Sweet – 3 16. Lady Apple – 2 17. Esq. Packard Apple – 8 18. Fall or Winter Sheep – 2 19. Porter Apple – 2 20. Norman W Apple – 2 21. Orange Sweet – 5 22. Little Core – 5 23. Name unknown – 2 24. Reed cheack [sic] Russett – 1 *Said to be the oldest known variety in America

25. Robbins sweet Russett – 1 26. Early Bough – 5 27. Orange Sour – 3 28. N.Y. Pippin – 3 29. D Towers sweat [sic] Russett – 3 30. Monstrous Pippin – 3 31. Green Seeknofurther – 2 32. Bullock Pippin – 2 33. Loomis Sweet – 2 34. Summer Golden sweet – 3 35. Summer Pearmain – 2 36. Winter Sweet – 2 37. Barr – 2 3 38. Winter Pearmain – 4 3 39. Orange Winter – 1 ** 41. Richardson – 1 42. Jewits [Jewett's] fine Red – 1 43. Grandfather Cobb – 1 (Pear) 44. Howard -- 1 (Pear) 45. Winter Summer Pearmain – 2 46. Mother Apple – 2 47. Danvers Sweet – 7 48. Esopus Spitzenburg – [ ] 49. Northern Spy – 3 ** there is no entry #40

For my own small endeavor in growing heirloom apples I've planted one each: Golden Russet, Red Gravenstein, Westfield Seek-No-Further, Esopus Spitzenburg, and Duchess of Oldenburg. 

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References

The following were very helpful in writing this post:

     Sue Hubbell. "Of Apples in Heaven's  Mountains and in Cow Pastures." Chapter in Shrinking the Cat: Genetic Engineering before We Knew About Genes. Houghton, Mifflin Co., 2001.

     Howard Means. Johnny Appleseed: The Man, the Myth, the American Story. Simon & Schuster, 2011.

     Russell Steven Powell. Apples of New England: A User's Guide. Countryman Press, 2014.

     Henry David Thoreau. "Wild Apples," essay originally published November, 1862, in The Atlantic Monthly, November, 1862. Reprinted in Wild Apples and Other Natural History Essays. Univ. of Georgia Press, 2002.      

     Roger Yepsen. Apples. Countryman Press,  rev. ed 2017, p. 13.

In addition to the website for Fedco linked above, more information about heirloom apples can be found at: 

Apple Search: The Search for "Lost" Heritage Apples

New England Apples

Epic Gardening

A bit of judicious Googling will no doubt turn up others.

The Tune in the Christmas Cracker

This post is something I put up as a "Note" on Facebook back in 2013. It generated a considerable and gratifying amount of discussion among my friends who are into Irish music. Because it's been several years since I posted it, and because Facebook recently made some changes that have rendered "notes" extremely difficult for people to find, I've decided to re-post the story here. I take this opportunity to add some illustrations. Comments are again very much welcome!    -- December, 2020

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Some years ago I bought a copy of Capt. Francis O'Neill's Dance Music of Ireland off eBay from a seller somewhere in the UK. This was not a first edition of the 1001 Gems, but is a relatively old one. It's identified on the cover as the "11th Edition." This edition was "Edited and arranged by" Selena O'Neill (a protege of, but no relation to, the good Captain), and published by her in 1940. It carries a hand-written ownership statement identifying it as having once been the property of one J. McTernan, of Oscott College, Sutton Coldfield. Google maps tells me that this is just northeast of Birmingham, England.

While this is cool in and of itself, the book carried a hidden treasure--a single sheet of music manuscript paper on which are two meticulously hand-written tunes. The toy inside the Christmas cracker, as it were. Because one of the tunes is the reel that Irish musicians all know as "Christmas Eve"--identified on the sheet by the name of its composer, Tommy Cohen (sic: Coen)--we offer it here as a small seasonal gift for all our friends, musicians and non-musicians alike. (See below for a reproduction of the entire manuscript page.)

On the back of the sheet is a note: "With all the Compliments of Liam Donnelly," and was given to Hugh McTernan, presumably a relative of the person who originally owned the O'Neill book. At the time I acquired this, we queried fiddler Seamus Connolly to see if he knew either Donnelly or McTernan. My memory of his response is a bit dim, but I believe that he did know, or at least knew of, Mr. Donnelly. We have since learned that Liam Donnelly was a fairly well-known figure in Irish music circles and did the musical orthography for a large book of tunes compiled by fiddler Martin Mulvihill.

Seamus also told us that the tune acquired the title "Christmas Eve" because it was debuted on that night on Ciaran MacMathuna's radio program sometime in the 1950s. The "W. Brown" named on the ms. sheet was a Billy Brown who played accordion on the broadcast. Seamus related that Tommy Coen himself never liked the title "Christmas Eve" for the tune, though whether or not he had a preferred alternative we don't know.

In any event, we hope that our friends will enjoy this greeting from us. Peace and joy to all!

--Paul and Sally Wells

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[Click on any image to get a larger copy]

Image of entire ms. page; "Mulhair's No. 5" is commonly known as "Limestone Rock":

Front cover of O'Neill book:

Ownership statement from title page:

Selena O'Neill, editor and publisher of this edition of 1001 Gems:

August: The Golden Month

August is the Golden Month. It is the month when Goldenrod fills open fields, turning them into oceans of amber. It's the month when Black-eyed Susans grow wild in meadows and along roadsides, and bring a big splash of cheer to our home gardens.

It's the month when Monarch butterflies begin to cruise through and light on Dahlias, Phlox, Cornflowers, and whatever else happens to be blooming, before laying their eggs on milkweed, setting in motion the process of perpetuating the species.

It's the month when marsh grasses mature and impart a lovely, multi-hued aura to lands near the coast, with greens and browns mixed in with the golds.

 

August is the month when sunflowers, towering above everything else in the garden, reach their maturity. Young Goldfinches, among the last songbirds to be fledged for the summer, come with their parents to pluck the ripe seeds out of the centers of the blossoms. 

But not all the August flora is golden. Queen Anne's Lace, with its complex, delicate, seemingly otherworldly beauty, blooms alongside the Goldenrod and Black-eyed Susans. 

It is the month when Argiope aurantia makes her welcome return to our flower beds. She nightly spins her beautiful webs, luring unsuspecting flies and beetles to their doom. At the same time, ripe, juicy blackberries lure me into their thorny midst, to endure scratched arms and legs for the sake of gathering a few tasty treats!

Numerous other seasonal events also define August. It is the month when the Perseid meteor showers tempt us to venture out late at night, in the hope of witnessing a celestial light show. It is the month for marveling at the acrobatic maneuvers of flocks of Nighthawks, as they hunt insects at dusk; their long, pointy wings with transverse white stripes make them unmistakable even to casual observers. It is the time for mowing rowen, and the chance to enjoy another display of avian acrobatics, from swallows this time, before they make their early exit from New England and head south for the winter. It's the month of agricultural fairs, of corn on the cob, of ripening apples, of wearing t-shirts and shorts during the hot days and bundling up in sweaters and sweatshirts during the chilly nights.

For so many years, when the cycle of my life was tied to the academic calendar, August was a time of, if not exactly dread, of less-than-eager anticipation of the changes that September would inevitably bring. As a kid, the prospect of exchanging the carefree, unstructured time of Summer for the regimen of the school day was unwelcome, to say the least. As an adult, working in a university, August meant that the relative quiet of a thinly-populated summer campus would soon be transformed into a time of chaos and commotion, as hordes of students returned, and faculty and staff were plunged into a seemingly endless series of meetings and receptions. 

One of the great joys of retirement has been that I can now enjoy August--in all its golden splendor--as never before. Yet it remains a time that brings out uncertain and ambiguous emotions. Can summer really be over already? But I never quite got around to doing X, Y, and Z as I had planned. I'm tired of mowing the lawn and weeding & watering the gardens...but I'm not ready to think about raking leaves, and certainly not about shoveling snow. Is it time to put away the air conditioners and fans? But what if we get a very warm "Indian summer"? (Now there's a term that needs to go away!*) The Fall foliage should be beautiful...but it's been so dry. Will we get much of a display?

I find Sylvia Plath's characterization of August to be quite cogent: 

The best of the summer gone, and the new fall not yet born. The odd, uneven time.

And so it goes.

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*For an exploration of the term "Indian Summer" and some of its cultural and historical meanings, see Beneath the Second Sun, by Adam Sweeting.

"Behold, a lovely vine"

"Lovely Vine," from Jeremiah Ingalls' Christian Harmony, 1805

Now that I have retired and moved back to my native New England I find that what had always been a decidedly, if not deliberately, latent interest in the music of the early New England psalmodists, has risen more to the fore in my mind. It's not that I had no curiosity about the music of William Billings, Justin Morgan, Daniel Read, Supply Belcher, and their numerous contemporaries--far from it, in fact--but it was an interest that always bubbled under the surface as I pursued topics of greater intellectual and musical priority to me personally. One reason for my relative disinterest was the fact that the music of the "First New England School" of American composers has been well-mined by American musicologists. It was one of the principal areas of American music that received serious attention from the dedicated cadre of renegade musicologists who fought to have American topics accepted by the academy at a time when "musicology" meant only the study of the music of European composers.

By the time I became a serious player in the world of American music studies in the 1980s, however, the field had grown enough that work on Billings, et al., was becoming unfashionable. My contemporaries and I waged our own battles to burst the doors open further for scholarship in folk music, country music, African American music, music by female composers, and 20th century topics in general. Including--gasp!--rock 'n' roll! I had no desire to pursue research in a field that had been so thoroughly, and ably, plowed by others.

But from my current position on the sidelines of the academic world, and living back in the world of small(-ish) town New England in which I was raised (albeit in a different state), my priorities have shifted. If I may be permitted a god-awful cliche, I've been re-connecting with my roots--and very much enjoying doing so. This re-connecting has proceeded along a couple of lines.

The first has been engaging in a good deal of serious reflection about my formative years on the family farm in western Massachusetts, as can be seen in some of the other posts in this blog. Beyond simply re-visiting memories from earlier times and indulging in self-centered nostalgia, I have been striving to get a better understanding of the cultural and historical context of the rural New England life that is my family's heritage. The fact that it is a way of life that has all but disappeared has no doubt contributed to my interest in exploring it.

The second has been strengthening and expanding my long-standing interest in music of the region. The study of New England fiddle music has been the biggest part of this interest, and the one that has largely defined my academic identity. Living in the area again has inspired me to pick up where I left off in the realm of fiddle research and scholarship more than 30 years ago. As a player I have regained much of the repertoire of Yankee and Franco-American tunes that I had in the 1970s but which had lain fallow during the many years I lived in California and Tennessee. My wife and I also co-hosted a weekly radio show devoted to traditional music of New England and Atlantic Canada for a few years.

But in addition to fiddle music, I now find myself quite happily delving into the world of the music of the New England psalmodists of the late 18th and early 19th century, the music that previously I had so consciously skirted. My academic explorations have been enhanced greatly by having an opportunity to bring some of this music to life in performance via involvement in the music program of our local village church.

It is a serendipitous treat when my explorations and ruminations along these two paths converge, when the realm of agrarian life of an earlier time becomes manifest in some fashion in the world of early New England sacred music. Which brings me to the real subject of this post.

One major source of guidance into the world of early New England psalmody has been recordings and live performances by various artists, principally the Boston Camerata. Their recording of "Lovely Vine," Vermont psalmodist Jeremiah Ingalls' setting of a text by Joshua Smith, published in Ingalls' Christian Harmony in 1805, has long been a favorite. 

Apart from the fact that "Lovely Vine" has a melody that is, well, lovely, a big reason for its appeal to me personally is the imagery of grapes on the vine, and the thoughts this evokes of my own upbringing. On the farm where I was raised there is a very old Concord grape vine. Just how old, I don't know, but it has been there for as long as I have been alive, and I have reason to believe that it pre-dates my father's birth in 1911. I wrote a bit about the vine a couple of years back in a post about the local agricultural fair, and the produce that my grandfather exhibited there (which included Concord grapes) around the time my father was born. In that earlier post I mentioned the fond memories I have of enjoying the products of that vine on many a late summer or early autumn day.

A few years back, in 2016 I think, I obtained a bit of root stock of the old vine, courtesy of my cousins who now own the family place. I planted it in our yard in Maine where it survived, but did not exactly thrive...until last year when the aforementioned cousin came and built an arbor for it. Since then it has done remarkably well -- see photo below!

 

By late September--voila!--nice, fat, juicy, sweet Concords, ready to eat! When I bit down on the first one I was immediately hit with a flood of memories of eating them as a kid. (We only got to enjoy about half the crop before some critters--raccoons, I suspect--helped themselves to the rest, but that's another story.) 

As I write in mid-July 2020, the vines are again flourishing in their second year on the arbor. There are green grapes a-plenty; bunches of bunches, as it were. Every time I walk past the arbor the sight calls forth Ingalls' tune and Smith's poetry: 

Behold a lovely vine, here in this desert ground,

The blossoms shoot, and promise fruit,

And tender grapes are found.

This coming together of two aspects of my New England heritage, music and agriculture, is immensely gratifying. 

The grape vine is just one of the bits of the family farm that I have brought with me to my home in southern Maine. I still own the small lot on the farm where the sugarhouse once stood and have used that as the source of most of what I have transported here. Six young sugar maples from that lot now line one side of our driveway. A few years back I disassembled a rather nondescript shed that had served variously as sleeping quarters for hired hands in years past, as a chicken house, and as an ad hoc storage building. I've re-purposed materials from that project in numerous ways: exterior boards became siding for a new garden shed; the heavy beams of the frame now serve as edging for our vegetable garden; some stones from the foundation went into a border for a new flower garden; others were used to make a patio in front of the new shed; and the 3" x 5" timbers from inside the walls work perfectly as the frame of the grape arbor. 

All of these things are important for their value in connecting me not only to my own past, but also to the deeper culture and heritage of my family and region. Yet, it is perhaps the grapevine that provides the strongest link from the past to the present. The fact that it is a scion of the same vine that has produced fruit that has been enjoyed by six generations of my family is pretty impressive. It is, indeed, a "lovely vine," eminently worthy of being celebrated in song.

One can easily point to other pieces from the early New England sacred repertoire that employ agrarian motifs. "Jesus Christ, the Apple Tree," another personal favorite is, not surprisingly, again the work of Jeremiah Ingalls--though he was just one of several composers who have done settings of a text written by Richard Hutchins. The Shaker song, "O, We Have a Lovely Vine," seems to be an adaptation of Smith's poetry, if not Ingalls' music. (See Patterson, p. 205) Harvest metaphors, and imagery of trees, birds, and farm animals abound. These all speak to the close ties between the corporeal and spiritual realms that formed the backbone of the world view of early Yankee farmers. They had to believe that with enough hard labor on their part, and perhaps a bit of Divine assistance, the earth would provide.

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Postscript: Concord grapes are themselves a product of New England's agrarian heritage. Their story begins in the town in eastern Massachusetts whose name they bear. They were developed by a man named Ephraim Wales Bull (1806-1895). Bull was born in Boston and moved the 20 or so miles west to Concord in 1836. Concord was at this time a thriving center of literary and intellectual activity; Bull could count Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, the Alcott Family, and Nathaniel Hawthorne among his neighbors. Prior to moving to Concord, Bull had made his living as a "goldbeater"--making gold leaf--but in his new home he developed a passion for horticulture. He set about to breed a variety of grape that would be suitable both for fresh eating and for making wine, and that would be hardy enough to survive a New England winter. He began working with a native wild grape (probably fox grapes) that possessed some of the characteristics of sweetness and hardiness that he found desirable. After several years of experimentation he introduced his new variety at the 1853 meeting of the Massachusetts Horticultural Society. It became widely popular, but Bull profited little from his invention. The marker on his grave in Concord carries the wistful epitaph: "He sowed, others reaped." 

New England Historical Society

Post-postscript: Lending credence to my belief that the vine from which my cutting was derived is well over a century old, is the fact that Bull's original vine is said to still be growing at his home in Concord. There's a better-than-even chance that Bull himself was still alive when whatever level of great-ancestor it was who planted "our" vine did so. I suppose it is even within the realm of possibility that the vine was there when my great-grandfather, Alexius Wells, bought the farm in 1864, and that its presence is due to the fact that someone responded to an ad like this one from 1859, touting Concord grapes as the latest and greatest. (Click on the image for a larger copy.)

Sources: 

Long article on Bull in Arnoldia, the quarterly magazine of the Arnold Arboretum at Harvard University. 

New England Historical Society article on Bull. 

Daniel Patterson, The Shaker Spiritual, Princeton Univ. Press, 1979.

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"Lovely Vine" transcribed into modern notation, with simple piano accompaniment added (click on the image for larger copy:

"Just Farmering": Remembrances of an Extraordinary Ordinary Man

Every year during the first week of November memories of my father dominate my thoughts. I write on November 2, 2019, the nineteenth anniversary of the day he passed away. As seems to happen with many people, the date of his death was very close to the date of his birth; he was born on November 5. He was a Good Man, well-liked and well-respected by all who knew him. He is with me every day of my life; I'm sure my siblings would say the same thing. 

When it came time to plan his memorial service I volunteered to write the eulogy. This was simultaneously one of the most difficult things I've ever done, and one of the most rewarding. Writing it gave me the opportunity to collect my thoughts about the man, and to reflect on both his life and my own. I shall be forever grateful to my siblings for affording me this privilege. I offer the eulogy here, with the addition of a few photos to illustrate a bit of Frannie's long and rich life. (In the piece I refer to two of the other readings that were part of the service: the famous lines from Ecclesiastes about seasons, and a light-hearted poem that Dick Wilbur wrote for my father and read at the reception given for him the first time he retired from the town Board of Selectmen.)

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Francis Richard Wells

November 5, 1911 – November 2, 2000

How well do we ever really know our fathers? The person who is one of the central figures in our lives, who is responsible for giving us life, often remains a figure defined by role rather than by his own qualities as a person. Over the course of our lives, how much time do we really spend in the company of our fathers, especially in this era of increased mobility, when few people live their lives in the same community in which they were raised, surrounded by family? We grow up and leave home just when we’re getting to the age when we can begin to appreciate our fathers.

It was only after I had been away from my hometown of Cummington, Massachusetts, for many years and had completed my education, gotten married, and had a child—in short, had gotten a good dose of life on my own—that it finally dawned on me what an extraordinary man my father was. He never had a lot of the things that so many people quest for in life—no power, wealth, or fame—yet I have never known anyone who was more content with his life. He was a man who knew himself, knew the world he lived in, and who spent his life surrounded by family and friends.

After my siblings and I left home—and long before the days of e-mail!—our mother faithfully wrote to us at least once, often twice a week.  Letters from our father, though, were a much rarer commodity. I think I received three. Their scarcity rendered them all the more meaningful, and I still have them all today. In one he responded to my plan, in 1983, to leave Los Angeles, where my first wife, young son, and I were living at the time, and come back to Cummington to try our hand at making a living in a less stressful manner. Pop wrote in support of the idea, and philosophized about his work on the farm. He said: “Many of my friends ask me—‘how come you seem to be so happy all the time?’  I tell them that I am doing what I like to do best, and most of the time I understand what it is that I am up to.”

That sentence has stuck with me ever since. “I am doing what I like to do best, and most of the time I understand what it is that I am up to.” How many of us can say that about our own lives and careers? All the career counselors and psychologists in the world could not come up with a clearer, more sure-fire prescription for how to achieve happiness in life.

What my father liked to do best was to be out on the farm working—driving his tractors, cutting wood, getting in hay, making maple syrup, fixing fence, tending cattle, planting corn, or weeding his garden. It was what he did all his life, and what defined him as a person.

He had a great word to describe this way of life, a word that I never heard him use until one day in the early 1980s, during the time when I lived in Cummington again for a couple of years. He and I were down in the village somewhere, going about whatever business it was that we had that day, when we ran into Lincoln Howes. Linc gave my father a hearty greeting, in his usual manner: “Hello Francis! What are you boys up to today?” To which my father replied: “Oh not much…the same old thing...just farmering.”

I thought: “’Farmering.’  What a great word!” It evokes so much more than does simply saying that one farms for a living, or that one is a farmer. It implies a way of being in the world, and describes an approach to life rather than a mere occupation. 

This is a life that is very much tied to the rhythms of the year—to take the words of Ecclesiates 3:1-8 quite literally, for everything in my father’s life there was indeed a season, and a time for every purpose. Spring meant sugaring, and then planting corn, fixing fence, and putting in the garden. Summer meant haying, and at the end of the summer, the Cummington Fair. Fall was time for picking sweet corn and getting in silage, while winter was for cutting and hauling wood. There was always something different to do so the work stayed interesting, yet the constancy of the yearly cycle provided a stable backdrop against which it all took place.

It is perhaps impossible for us today to understand fully the world my father knew and grew up in. To live one’s entire life in one place, to be rooted as firmly in family and community as he was, is something that is becoming remarkably rare in our society. This rootedness gave my father a solid sense of self and purpose, and this sense was inextricably bound to place—to the farm, and to Cummington.

Students at Bryant Schoolhouse, Cummington, MA, c. 1920. Frannie standing far right, under corner of window.

Look at the dates his life spanned—one decade shy of the entire 20^th century—and think of the astounding changes to our culture and way of life that he witnessed! Literal horse power gave way to the internal combustion engine. When he was a boy, a one-way trip to Northampton meant a day’s travel, and long-distance communication was limited to the range of one’s voice. He was born into a world much quieter and more slower-paced than what we know now, a world in which hard, manual labor was the only way to get things done. His was perhaps the last generation to grow up in this world, in the culture of the small family farm that formed the backbone of the rural New England economy for so many years, and that our family has been part of since the first Wells ancestor came to the New World in the 17th century. 

His solid grounding in this world was, I think, what allowed him to maintain his extraordinary sense of who and what he was, in the face of the great changes that he witnessed in his own community and in the world at large. It allowed him to keep farmering into the age of the Internet.

Farmering kept my father out of doors a great deal of the time and, unlike many of his peers, he developed an abiding love, appreciation, and respect for nature and the wonders of the natural world. His interest in birds was well known, and he passed this love along to many of us in the next generations. Every year he would delay cutting the hay in the meadow above the barn until the Bobolinks had finished their nesting—and he took a great deal of ribbing from some of his peers when they learned of this practice.

His face would light up with sheer delight at the sights and sounds of geese migrating in the fall. Some of my own most treasured moments with him came when we were hard at work hauling wood or taking down fence on some gray November day, and all of a sudden he would freeze and say: “Hark! Geese!” Then together we’d search the skies for a glimpse of the V of a big flock, wheeling at full throttle, high in the air on its way to wintering grounds down south. 

He had an excellent ear for identifying and remembering bird songs. He knew the songs of numerous species of warblers that he would hear only a few times a year during migration, and could make the fine distinction between the songs of the wood and hermit thrushes. All of this skill and knowledge he acquired simply through a lifetime of observation, during the course of farmering for nine decades.

But farmering was not the whole extent of my father’s life. There was, after all, the “buzzing swarm of Frannies” that friend and neighbor, poet Richard Wilbur, once described in a short tribute poem to him. He was a man devoted to public service. He served the town of Cummington as Selectman for a quarter century, from 1951 to 1976, then came out of retirement in 1982 when his services were once again needed to fill the void left by another man's death. He served on boards and committees throughout the Hilltowns and the Pioneer Valley, and through this work made many friends far beyond the bounds of Cummington. He was a lifetime member of the Massachusetts Maple Producers Association, and enjoyed many years as a member of the Harvest Club. He also drove a school bus, served as substitute rural mail carrier, and worked many winters at Berkshire Snow Basin. He maintained a lifelong interest in politics on the state and national level. In what was perhaps his final act of will, he completed his absentee ballot for the 2000 presidential election, on what turned out to be the night before he went into the hospital for the last time.

My father had his share of the contradictions and paradoxes that make human beings such interesting creatures. He was an utterly non-violent man, but his favorite sport was boxing. He was a devoted family man, but was an incorrigible flirt. He could wrap a young waitress or store clerk around his little finger in a matter of seconds, blushing profusely all the while. And I can still hear my mother, clucking in disgust: “Frannie!  Honestly!”

He always wanted to travel to see new places and to visit far-flung family members, but was itchy to get back to the farm and to Cummington after about two days away. He felt that he was unmusical, but was an enthusiastic, graceful, and skilled square dancer. He often said that he would rather square dance than eat! His formal education ceased when he graduated from high school, but he was an avid reader and was extremely knowledgeable on subjects ranging from American history, to aviation, to meteorology, to world exploration.

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To close this remembrance of my father, I would like to share a personal memory of one particular time with him. I do not know why this incident sticks in my mind as strongly as it does, but so be it.

On Christmas Eve, 1983, the two of us went to cut some wood in what our family called the Drake Pasture. It was a cold, blustery day. There was a bit of snow on the ground, but not so much that we couldn’t drive a tractor and trailer deep into the woods. We spent the day felling trees and cutting them up for firewood. Fairly late in the afternoon, probably around 3:00 or 3:30, when daylight was beginning to fade, it started to snow. Down in the woods there was little or no wind, so the snow just fell quietly to the ground. We had quit running our chain saws by this time and were loading up the trailer with wood to haul back to the house. Anyone who has ever been in the woods on a day like this knows the peculiar effect that this sort of silent, heavy snowfall can have. A profound stillness descends on the world as the snow covers up the ground and muffles all sound.

Once we had the trailer loaded, we both just sat there for awhile. No words were exchanged between us, nor were any needed. We watched the snow drift down around us, and silently marveled at the way it transformed the landscape into a beautiful world of white. After a few minutes Pop finally broke the spell and said simply, “Well, let’s go home.”

As I remember that day, I like to think that he has now  “gone home” for the final time, to greener pastures, where he is reunited with our mother, and is farmering now with God.

Paul F. Wells 
November 20, 2000