Mennonites Don't Dance by Darcie Friesen Hossack

Author:Darcie Friesen Hossack [Hossack, Darcie Friesen]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: FIC000000, FIC019000, FIC044000
ISBN: 9781897235782
Publisher: Thistledown Press
Published: 2010-09-29T04:00:00+00:00

DANDELION WINE

STEEP DANDELION BLOSSOMS IN HOT WATER. Let stand 24 hours. Strain. Heat infusion, add sugar and lemons and pour into stone jars to ferment. Skim daily for 6 to 7 weeks before bottling.

The creek was low, a meandering slug trail through a withered garden. Drawn by habit, Joely squatted next to it, dredged up doomed minnows from the muck, and tossed them to a fat tabby that had followed her.

After a month of drought she was bored with the heat, the listlessness that kept everyone doing no more than necessary. Even the chickens laid eggs only in the morning, after which they left the henhouse to doze in the shade.

Joely had hoped her sister would want to help her investigate the hayloft for a new litter of kittens. She knew by the wagging belly of the mother cat that they were up there, but when she crept into Hayley’s room in the drape-darkened morning Hayley mumbled something about having only two more weeks to catch up on sleep before heading back to college. Joely climbed up into the loft by herself, but it wasn’t the same without someone to help reach shoulder-deep into the scratchy, dark hollows between bales and listen for the faint squeaks of kittens mewing to be fed. After a few attempts, Joely gave up, defeated by the heat, and lowered herself down the wall ladder to the floor of the barn.

The creek smelled of decaying water plants. Only recently, wildflowers, clumps of bluebells and pink asters, black-eyed Susans and wild purple tulips had covered the fields. With summer came mosquitoes and grasshoppers, and only the sturdy yellow dandelions remained, now competing with tenacious wild grasses and prickly weeds to draw up what water there was from the soil. Joely knew plenty of people like that. Resolute, like her mother. But Joely could only ever seem to imitate their resilience.

Inside, she felt dormant, waiting for gentler weather to coax her from the dry husk of too many days like this.

Inside the house Joely found her mother basted in sweat, a weekday dress clinging to her skin as she banded and wiped clean a table full of glass jars filled with the overripe apricots she’d cooked down to jam that morning.

Over three sticky days spent in the summer kitchen adjacent to the house, she and Joely had canned preserves, filling rows of sterile jars with the peaches, apricots, and plums they’d bought by the crate from B.C. fresh-fruit trucks. There were still raspberries and cherries to be mashed into sugary red jam, and grapes boiled and strained for jelly.

“Do you think we could go into town today?” Joely said, even though she knew the raspberries probably wouldn’t keep another day.

“You can help me with the rest of this fruit is what you can do. Your sister seems to think she doesn’t live here anymore,” her mother said as she sleeved sweat from her forehead. “She expects me to take jam and crumpets up to her in bed like I’m running some sort of hotel.

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