January 4, 2019
The Coldest Day
This is story of the coldest day for us in winter 2009-2010:
It was the second winter in the farm house. We loved that house because there were twelve citrus trees, a huge ancient fig tree, an Asian pear tree, tons of mulberry, pecan, and oak trees, an old neglected trio of muscadine grape vines on the arbor, and blackberry vines in thickets around the perimeter fence.
We had worked feeding and tending each of the trees for almost two years. Most had given us hearty thanks in the form of yummy, sweet fruit. Well, the pecans actually were eaten by the over abundant squirrel population and one of the orange trees was sour so when we wanted lemonade we actually just popped off six of those giant sour oranges and made orangeade instead. It was light yellow in color and except for a slight orange flavor; the girls thought it was lemonade!
There were two tangerines, one pink grapefruit, three yellow grapefruit, one tangelo, two small orange, one lime, and one sour orange tree that had given us fruit after the first winter. Since it had been a mild winter with no deep freezes, the fruit was sweet and had set on the trees over spring as we harvested it in perfectly manageable sets.
Only the navel orange hadn’t yielded fruit. Until this year. It was so loaded we had to support the weaker limbs with stilts despite heavy pruning during the summer! We were so excited because we’d been told it was the sweetest fruit but almost never had a crop. It looked like we had accomplished our goal!
But this winter had only just started.
We’d already had almost a week of mild freezes – just enough for frost, but not enough to freeze the fruit. Grandma Jeanette had called them “sugar freezes.” Now I knew that was because citrus fruit needs five to seven days of light freezes to sweeten. However, the one deep freeze could destroy the whole crop as it would freeze the fruit through the skins and rot them. We had watered down each tree carefully just before sunrise after each of the light freezes, but the forecast said tomorrow, January 7, 2010, we would wake to temperatures below 28 degrees. In our little area, we sunk two to four degrees below what the news said every time.
This would be a fruit-killing deep freeze.
And of all our citrus, the navel orange had the thinnest skin so would be the most affected.
I determined we would harvest all that fruit today.
We didn’t do school lessons, but immediately after milking the cow and feeding the chickens, we tugged the blue fruit bucket (a giant plastic washtub that held about 12 bushels) over to the tree and started picking. I sent Christina and Rebeccah into the tree. At 6 and 4 they were already experts at climbing through citrus trees avoiding the horridly sharp thorns. They scrambled up and out to get the highest fruit. We worked on for hours, singing and laughing. And my belly contracted. I was 41 weeks pregnant.
After her work was over, Grandma Joanne showed up. Seems there’s this old wives tale that if you reach up a lot while you’re pregnant, your baby will be all wrapped up in their cord. (Maybe so, as 2-year-old Kimberly, who was racing around tossing fruit her sisters plopped on the ground into the bucket, had been born with her cord around her neck. I hung clothes out on a line her whole pregnancy.) I told her I wasn’t wasting this fruit. I offered her a bag. She didn’t think that was funny. We were almost done. We were on our third bucket and there were only a few scattered edge pickings left. Rebeccah had decided they were unreachable. That was why I was on the ladder to get them. Christina was busy, putting the last bucket’s goodies into some of the fruit boxes in the garage.
Using the ladder and 4-prong rake (the girls call it the hand-tiller or the fruit-grabber depending on which use we were employing), we managed to get all of the succulent fruit off of that beautiful tree.
That night, I couldn’t sleep. For the first time I watched all three “Lord of the Rings” extended editions back to back in the bed as I tried to sleep. Baby was coming.
Early morning on the coldest day of our winter of 2009-2010, Jaquline Ellouise Tart was born.
Jaquline and Grandma Joanne – Jaquline is less than an hour old.
Christina and Louis made us sweet, fresh orange juice for celebration drinks! (And yes, Jaquline was born with a cord so long the midwife and her assistant measured it to confirm it was the longest they’d ever seen – and it was wrapped around her neck “like a winter scarf,” according to our midwife but was too long to pose a risk.)
Jaquline and Lucas with leaves!
Jaquline with Daddy at a football game!
Jaquline will be nine in a few days… and the story of the navel oranges picked the day before her birth is one of her favorites! She also loves the part about how she chose to be born on the coldest day that hit our house that winter.
Thanks for reading!
Type at you next time…
~Nancy Tart