Stikine River

A Lying Liar and a Singer Sewing Machine

| Hope

Recently I read (and watched) a story about the first lie the author ever told as a child. Years later, the author — now a teacher — still vividly remembers the experience. Reading his story, I realized that my own first lie is just as indelibly branded on my memory.

I was four years old. It was my family’s first year living in a tiny cabin next to the Stikine River in British Columbia, where we trapped furs for income, hunted and fished for meat, and grew a huge garden full of vegetables that we preserved for winter food. In that remote place, there was no electricity, unless we used precious fuel to run a generator — something we did only on laundry days to run our ancient cylindrical wringer washing machine.

My mother’s sewing machine was a worn but elegantly beautiful foot-treadle-powered Singer sewing machine with a wooden cabinet and a painted metal head, which I called the “horse.” She doesn’t have it anymore, but I found a picture of a nearly identical machine (this one has a wooden cover that’s shown in a different photo; my mother’s allowed the top to rotate down into the cabinet) at Copycat Collector:

A beautiful Singer sewing machine.
A beautiful Singer sewing machine.

I loved the whir of the flywheel and belt and the rhythmic thump of the treadle when my mom sewed. But most of all, I was fascinated by the shining blur of the speeding needle.

My mother had been sewing one afternoon while I watched, when she found she needed something outside. “I’ll be back in a minute,” she said. “DON’T TOUCH THE SEWING MACHINE.”  I had just learned how to time one minute on the clock. I sat myself down on a chair below the pear-shaped wooden clock my dad had made, and kept my eyes fixed on the second hand. It went all the way around one time, but my mother was nowhere to be seen. Perhaps I’d been mistaken in my attempt to count off a minute. I watched again. Still no mother. Clearly, she had gotten lost and was never returning.

Tears welled up, my chin wobbled, and I opened my mouth for a hearty wail — which was stopped, abruptly, by my realization that I was not just motherless, I was unsupervised. I could do whatever I wanted. I could…I could…

I could touch the sewing machine.

I approached the shining, forbidden machine slowly, carefully. Reached out one finger. Stroked the painted design. Strummed the leather belt. Examined the shining silver balance wheel (that’s the small wheel at the end of the head, for those that care). I gloried in the machine’s beauty, now all mine. Finally, I ventured to touch the most dreaded part of the never-to-be-touched sewing machine: the needle. I slid my finger under the point, relishing the delicate scratch of the sharp tool. Then I rested my finger below the needle, on the toothy feed dogs (the teeth that pull the fabric forward), and eyed the wheel speculatively. When turned by hand or by the belt connected to the treadle down below, the silver balance wheel put a series of hidden cogs into motion, causing the needle to flash up and down. I’d seen my mother turn the wheel many times with a practiced hand, to position the needle correctly or to boost the motion when starting a seam so as to put less strain on the leather belt. I was tall enough to stretch one hand to the wheel while resting my finger under that seductive needle. My mind raced with the possibilities. Finally, motherless, I could do what I’d always (I now knew) wanted to do: race the needle.

I was positive I could do it. Surely my finger could move faster than the needle. I would turn the wheel slowly at first, for practice. But I failed to take physics into account. Turning the balance wheel slowly still caused the needle to flash oh, so very quickly, right into my waiting finger. It slashed a red furrow into the side of my finger, which quickly welled with blood. I stared, aghast. My beloved machine had betrayed me. Suddenly, being motherless lost its appeal. I opened my mouth and bellowed: “MOMMMMMMYYYYYY!”

Instantly, like magic, there she was, wrapping me in her arms, soothing my tears, prying my hand open to see the source of the blood, and demanding sternly, “Did you touch the sewing machine?”  And I, weeping with the shock of the needle’s cruelty, streaming blood from a needle-shaped gash in my finger, sobbed, “N-n-n-noooooo!”

For years afterward, I believed that I’d successfully convinced my mother that I hadn’t touched the machine. I wrestled with guilt and shame: I had lied to my mother. I had deceived. I was almost certainly going straight to hell. The experience was so wrenching — the lie, not the gash — that I never lied again. Ever. I bent the truth slightly on occasion; I evaded; I distracted and misdirected when necessary; but I never a lie. To this day, I can’t do it. It’s simply impossible. I relive the horrified, ashamed ache in my belly that came with the lie, and I just can’t manage it. And it’s all because I was betrayed by a beautiful piece of mechanical art.

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Drying Fruit and Memories

| Hope

This summer, as our fruit (blueberries, cherries, raspberries, apples) began to ripen, Aaron came home one weekend with a dehydrator. It’s round and shiny-white, shaped like a donut with a too-small center hole, and has four drying trays plus a fruit leather tray liner and a liner for jerky. So I’ve spent the summer’s end learning to dry fruit. My greatest success by far has been apples, both slices and leather. You can see my method for drying apples here.

Now, I’m no stranger to drying fruit. For seven years, between ages four and eleven, I lived with my family (and another family for three years, plus assorted winter visitors for the next few years) on a remote homestead in British Columbia, Canada. My father trapped during the winter, and we used the money he earned from furs to buy supplies we needed to live each year. Yes, one shopping trip per year. And we had no refrigerator or freezer. No electricity at all, except for the weekly laundry day when we

This is very close to what our machine looked like, except my mother never looked that excited to use it. Nor did she wear a white-collared dress while operating it.
This is very close to what our machine looked like, except my mother never looked that excited to use it. Nor did she wear a white-collared dress while operating it.

would start up the generator to run the ancient wringer washer – a big improvement from the manual James washer that sat out back behind a shed. Fuel had to be boated down the Stikine River in huge 50-gallon drums in our 20-foot skiff, so we didn’t use that generator any more than we absolutely had to.

With no refrigeration or weekly shopping trips, we had only what fresh food we could forage or hunt from the forest, catch in the river, or grow in our garden. I know that sounds like the life of Hansel and Gretel, pre-stepmother, but it’s what we did. And we dried or canned as much as we could for winter, since we wouldn’t have access to any fresh food once hunting season was over. I liked the dried food best – it had less mush. Raspberries. High-bush cranberries (properly known as lingonberries). Saskatoons. Strawberries. Thimbleberries. And we occasionally had crab apples from a neighbor (which here means, anyone living within a 30-mile radius). Once we even had bananas.

At some point, my dad built a drying shed. He dug a square pit, about 3 feet deep, and put a barrel stove in the bottom of it – that’s a stove made from a large metal barrel. They’re actually pretty effective. You can get kits for them, with a door and legs and hardware for a chimney. This stove was rustic looking, not like the nicer one he made for our cabin, which had heat-resistant black paint covering it and a big flat silver tray fitted onto the top for heating a giant pot of water for laundry and baths. The one in the drying shed had whatever flakes of paint still clung to the original barrel, interspersed with large areas of gently rusted steel. No one cared what this one looked like. He built walls around the pit once the stove was in, with a tightly-fitting door covering the whole front side. The walls had supports all around for sliding trays made of window screen material. We would put whatever we were drying – meat, vegetables, fruit – onto the screens, slide them in, and let them sit with the stove gently heating them until they were dry.

I asked my mom how she dried fruit before my dad built the drying shed – I was

Our stove was less ornate , white-enameled, and had an enclosed warming oven where this stove has a shelf. Otherwise, it looks pretty familiar.
Our stove was less ornate , white-enameled, and had an enclosed warming oven where this stove has a shelf. Otherwise, it looks pretty familiar.

small enough at that point that I don’t remember much as far as culinary skills. She thinks she used the warming oven in our big cast-iron range (think Blueberries for Sal, and you should have a good picture of our stove). So I’m guessing all you readers with modern kitchens, but lacking a dehydrator or a niftily-built drying shed, could still use my method for drying apples – you would just need to turn your ovens on low.

No, I’m no stranger to drying fruit. But my memories are nearly useless living, as I do, in a rural area less than half an hour from a major city. Drying fruit should be accompanied by the aroma of smoke in the air, the unique smell of cranberries (I know, I KNOW, lingonberries, sorry) ripening amid fallen leaves. Drying fruit comes with the creak of a wooden door, the rush of earth-metal-fruit-scented air in my face, the smooth glide of a screen pulling free from the rails. Using a dehydrator, after a drying shed or a cast-iron range, feels somehow artificial. Perhaps I feel I’m not working hard enough. In any case, the apples are delicious, and while I miss the nostalgic connection to my roots, I’m happy to have the ease of my shiny new dehydrator – all I need now is more trays for bigger batches!

You can click here for a more modern approach to drying apples!