The Old Jug

21

Grandpa used to make root beer, and it was amazing. I don’t think he used this jug for it, but the old jug reminds me of his root beer.

Memories are always a bit flawed, and mine are no different, but I have a memory, real or not, of a summer, many years after his death, when someone found a case of full bottles of root beer tucked away in the back of the old root cellar.

I remember sitting on the side lawn, between the little white house and the huge vegetable garden. I remember a bowl between my knees and pile of freshly picked peas. I remember shelling peas into the bowl, and into my mouth too, and tossing some of the pea pods into buckets to take to the neighbours to feed the goats, the rest to go into the compost pile behind the orchard outhouse.

The outhouse – affectionately known as “The White House” – was largely there for people who came to the orchard to pick their own cherries, but also for our use when we were picking for sales. It was called “The White House” because it was painted white, as was the actual house Grandma and Grandpa lived in.

There was a cherry tree that grew on its own behind “The White House” and it produced wonderful cherries. A little smaller than any of the specific varieties in the orchard, but sweet and excellent for canning. It wasn’t a tree that we picked for sales, but one or two people came most years and asked if they could buy “White House Cherries”. I always wondered if they ever knew why they were called what we called them.

But anyway, back to the peas, which lead (somehow) to the root beer.

On that hot and sunny day (or maybe not, because, as I say, memories are fallible and have a tendency to blur), someone went to the root cellar in the basement – a space carved out of the earth and fitted with a door, into which various things were stored. I don’t recall what, because the basement was a kind of scary place for me. Filled with spiders and imaginary monsters.

But “someone” went into the root cellar, looking for “something” and found some of Grandpa’s root beer.

I can’t even think of how old it must have been, but it was excitedly brought out onto the lawn and a bottle was opened.

Except it didn’t open so much as I recall it sort of exploding.

The root beer removed itself, completely of its own volition, when the cap was removed. No one got a drop of that first bottle.

Someone was smart and put some thought into how to approach the remaining bottles. A large pot was brought outside and someone held it in front of the bottle as it was opened so that the resulting geyser wouldn’t end up on the lawn.

In my memory it was delicious. The reality? Who knows.

I do know that, this time or some other, I’d take the pail of pea pods and run across the hay field, usually causing at least one pheasant to burst up out of the hay and into my face, and usually running headlong into at least one huge thistle plant almost as large as myself, before arriving at Weidingers farm to feed the goats.

I loved goats then, and I still love goats today.

And usually I’d come home with some eggs too.

The jug didn’t feature in any of that non-linear story, but it still does remind me of the root beer.