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Autumn on the Plains, part 1

© Mary Trotter Kion

It is autumn on the Great Plains and this earth-toned season has begun its grand promenade across the vast prairie. And although the daylight hours deceptively retains the warmth of a dieing summer, night's darkness reaches across the land with chilled curling fingers with threats of early frost.

Though all seasons are busy times for homesteaders on the Great Plains, autumn is one of the busiest and most crucial. Certainly throughout the summer food has been put by as it ripened, to fill hungry stomachs of humans and domestic animals during the long cold winter when freezing winds swoop down from the north, bringing layer upon layer of obliterating snows.

If the homesteader has been wise, as well as fortunate, a snug and thick-walled soddy home has been completed. Perhaps even a soddy shelter of some sort has been built to give protection for the homesteaders' animals. Even more fortunate is the industrious person who has dug and constructed a cellar for the storage of garden vegetables and perhaps fruits from a few trees and bushes. As a side benefit, this cellar also provides sturdy protection when tornados whip their deadly funnels across the plains. As a child I recall many a night spent in the depths of our cellar as one of those mysterious spirals of nature visited our Missouri farming area.

During those times we would all crouch there, surrounded by those sturdy walls that were lined with rows and rows of shelves. And on those shelves was the reassuring presents of numerous glass Ball, Mason, or Kerr jars, their zinc lids tightly in place, sealing in the goodness of a summer's labor. Since 1884 Ball Corporation had been providing the homesteader with these sturdy glass containers. The jars' contents were like a harvested rainbow. There were containers of tomatoes, peaches and pares, pickles of many varieties, carrots and beans and peas. The jams and jellies blended in their own hues and tints. Deep into winter their festive colors would remind us of a summer's sunshine and later of busy hands working together in a hot, steaming kitchen. To one side of the cellar would be burlap bags of potatoes and dried shelled beans. Not far from them would be rows of good winter squashes and pumpkins, their sweet nutty flavor just waiting to melt in your mouth when snow reached the windows of the soddy and great ice cycles decorated the outside roof.

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