Two pages in the diary so far, and each one is a whole season by itself. July sun baking the fence row, January frost two fingers down in the ground. This next page got turned to a different corner of the year, the one where everything is done and nothing is, and the air smells like the bottom of the woodpile come wet. The ink sits lighter on the page, like Amos’s hand was cold when he wrote it.
Saturday, October 17, 1903
First real frost this morning, white on the grass like somebody shook a flour sack over the yard, and the persimmons is bout right for the first time this fall. A green persimmon’ll draw your mouth shut like a dry sock, but one that’s bit by frost and hangin soft on the limb is the sweetest thing a poor man can pick off a tree for free. I took the younguns down to the big persimmon by the spring branch with a washtub, and I stood the two youngest up on my shoulders so they could reach the high limb where the possums aint got em yet.
Amos, later, at the foot of the page: “frost dont kill a persimmon, it fixes it. bout the only thing on this ridge that’s better for a hard night, cept a fat possum that’s been livin on the same fruit.”
The two youngest filled their hats and emptied em in the tub, and the middle one et six before we got home and then swore the seventh give him a sour one, which I told him is the persimmon’s way of makin an honest man out of a greedy boy. By the time we got back Martha had the wash kettle goin, and I dumped the whole tub in and started em down for persimmon butter, the kind that sits on a biscuit like somethin the Lord put away special just for cold mornings.
Amos, close to the bottom of the page: “a man can get rich off what the frost leaves him, long as he gets to it fore the possum does. and the possum always thinks he got there first, which is half the fun of beatin him.”
Them persimmons’ll set up sweet by morning, and Martha’ll can half of it and hide the rest where the boys won’t find it til the snow flies. I et one raw comin up the hill and it was so good I forgive the tree for every puckered-up mouth it give me when I was a kid too dumb to wait on the frost.
