Harvesting Summer

            I traded work for rent on the small cabin I lived in by myself before Laura and I married. I did yard work and maintenance on houses on the mountain and the jobs gave me enough income to pay my living expenses while I thought about what I was going to do next.

            Laura and I didn’t think a lot about money and the future when we married. We stayed on at the cabin in the Sierras, in a forest of pine trees and fir trees, oak, madrone, and a variety of other evergreens, and deciduous trees and brush and grasses and wild animals and wildflowers. We knew we would eventually have to move down to the valley, where more regular employment was available, but we weren’t ready yet.

            We walked down the cabin steps and then up the mountain on an old logging road. Thirty year old trees had started the slow process of blending the bladed road into the forest. Taller trees grew toward the sky beside the road and on ridges both sides of the road. We walked out of forest into a small meadow of mountain grasses, brush, and the last wild flowers of the year. Wild colors graced the meadow. Wild scents blended in mountain breezes.

            Four plum trees and a pear tree grew along the highest edge of the meadow, abandoned for decades, sowing small fruits for seeds, for food for wild life and for us, a ways from an ancient house, moss and bramble-grown, falling down and rotting into the forest at the edge of the meadow.

            Three deer stood on their hind legs, reached up into the trees, and harvested plums. They gave way reluctantly to approaching humans and trotted into the forest. Laura said, “The pears have a long way to go, but some of the plums are ready.”

            We harvested deep purple plums from one tree and dusty red plums from another and walked on up the mountain munching delicious fruit.

            Coutolenc Road crosses the mountain through the forest to the highway, gives access to a few houses, not much traffic. We walked up the dusty gravel surface two miles to the highway, up the highway to Lovelock, bought matches and a can of olives, lingered in summer sunshine in front of the store and shared a bottle of pop. People who lived down the highway from us stopped to buy something and offered us a ride. We accepted, and we all talked about the mountain we lived on. We rode to our driveway, dismounted, walked up the driveway.

            Tall conifer trees both sides of our driveway and close around our cabin gave us early shade through hot afternoons but also delayed sunrises and hastened sunsets at our cabin down in a hollow, a wide place between two ridges. We walked the mountain early and late, many summer days, found sunshine in higher places, and picked fruit. Blackberries, currants, and gooseberries ripened. We ate as we walked. Sometimes we brought fruit home with us. We returned to the cabin midmorning or at dusk.

            I went off to work small jobs here and there on the mountain. We traveled down the mountain to the hot city in summer’s Sacramento Valley to buy some of our needs, to visit with people, and to check on other ways to live besides on a summer mountain. Our plans said leave the mountain before snow storms of winter made it much harder to live there. Down in a lonesome hollow on west slope of the Sierras might not be the best place for us to live the short, cold days of mountain winter.

            Apples ripened in the meadow the other side of the highway and the creek from us, another abandoned homestead, but with a house in good condition, boarded up against the years, paint peeled away, gray, intricately grained wood open to the hot sun of summer.

            Winesap apples and golden delicious and “Maybe this is a Macintosh. I think so.”

            “Whatever it is, it’s really good.”

            “Look. Bears have been eating apples, and coyotes, maybe foxes. There’s more than all of us working together can eat.” We filled our backpacks and ate apples and apple pies all week and then went back for more.

            First rains came heavily to the mountain and cleared. We walked the wet, clean mountain. The sun shone warm again, but the days grew shorter and the nights grew colder. We walked and ate and stored up. When we moved to the valley, we were full of memories, everything we had learned from mountains and sunshine and relaxed days. We were full of apples and blackberries, too, and we carried enough apples with us to last half the winter, sweet reservoirs of mountain summer sun.