Barefoot Memories of a Hillbilly - A Little Trim off the Top and Sides

It’s that miraculous time of the year when the sky offers a buffet of weather to choose from, the peeper frogs are tricked into thinking the current mild spell is an actual introduction to Spring, and the seed catalogs are starting to show up in the mail. The only sure things about February are that regardless of whether that pesky groundhog saw his shadow or not, there will be at least 6 more weeks of some kind of weather. You can also count on Pap trimming his grape vines and pruning back the fruit trees. Pruning the trees now allows the cuts time to heal before the sap begins to rise in another month or so. Sure enough, as I topped the rise above home-place after walking home from school, I could see Pap out by the grapevines with what appears to be a growing pile of discarded vines and debris. There ain’t nobody who trims the vines and fruit trees like Pap. When he trims them grape vines and apple trees they know they’ve been trimmed.

You know, there’s nothing that says early warm days like the bleating of a body of peeper frogs. The sound is either melodic (if you are in a relaxed state) or it’s just plain aggravating (if you are a bit tighter-strung). After dumping my load of books and homework inside the house, I headed to the grapevines for my annual instruction on aggressive vine pruning. Though I see him do it every year, I’m still always a bit shocked (and surprised) to see how radical the trim job is. The weather is just plain balmy today; though it poured the rain on the walk to school this morning and rained off and on thru lunch time, the temperature has held to the low 60’s.   

We gathered up the vine trimmings and added them to the growing pile of scrap wood, stuff that’s not fit to burn in the stove, small limbs fallen from trees the last big wind blowing thru, and pieces that failed to burn with any integrity when used to stoke a fire. These are being heaped up and will be used to burn a lettuce or baccer bed next month. Burning a bed means almost exactly as it sounds. Wood scraps are placed on the ground where you want to plant your seed-beds. The ash itself helps “sweeten” the ground by acting like a neutralizer or alkaline. The heat from the intense fire sterilizes the ground as well as kills any weeds and such. Of course, now days you can buy canisters of gas to release under the cover of the plastic cover tented over the seed that will be planted. But even as good as the stuff can be, the folks still burn the ground.

After helping haul the scrap vines and limb pieces to the burn pile I tell Pap it’s time for me to head in to start us a bite to eat. Mom says she put some pork neck bones on to cook earlier today, and I think baking some sweet taters to go with that sounds pretty good. Also, it may not sound like it goes with the neck bones and sweet taters, but I’ve been wanting some fried cabbage…so I’m gonna fix some. Wow, you should see the trim Papa gave these grapevines and fruit trees!

I wear shoes now, but sometimes I have barefoot memories.