July was all about cutting cots.
The Lopin ranch was ten acres of apricots and prunes, with a few almonds thrown in for good measure. Harvesting prunes was ugly work, according to my mother and aunt who participated in their collection from the time they could walk to the time they were adult enough to find valid excuses not to. Prunes are plucked from the ground. Enough said.
Production of dried apricots is labor intensive, but doesn’t involve much stooping, kneeling, or bending over, so we all participated annually until my uncle, who ran the operation, declared it done. I’m not entirely sure when or why he no longer needed family participation in production of the fruit, but I do know that its beginnings predated my consciousness by several decades.
The apricot ripens according to the weather. A hot June and July will trigger rapid ripening, and as the best fruit for drying needs still to be firm, Uncle John’s expertise in knowing when to pick was necessarily well-sharpened. Family members would receive a phone call, “We start picking day after tomorrow, if you can cut, be there at seven.”
The apricot’s journey from tree fruit to dried fruit has several stages. The first is obviously to pick. But even that is nuanced. The over-ripe fruit was sequestered for use in producing “slabs”, thick pieces of irregular size, very sweet and soft. Under-ripe fruit needed to be left on the tree for a second, or even a third, picking a day or two later. The ready fruit was placed in large wooden boxes which were stacked in the cutting shed. That’s where we cutters came in.
The fruit was cut along its natural cleft, the pit removed and tossed into a little wooden box that sat on a single nail on one side, and on the rim of the tray on the other. Then the two apricot halves were carefully placed on the tray in rows, all pieces touching their neighbors, but always level so they would dry without forming clumps. Each cutter’s trays were stacked as they were filled, so you would begin the day seated and end it standing on a progressively taller tower made from fruit boxes.
Towards afternoon when enough trays were filled to justify, they were loaded onto a trolly that ran on a kind of railroad track between destination Sulphur House and destination Drying Yard. In order to protect it from grubs and burrowing insects, the fruit was shut into a shed where it was fumigated with burning sulphur. That process also helped the fruit keep its brilliant orange color. If you got downwind of the shed, it gave you a brilliant orange color, as well.
After several hours of fumigation, the trays was rolled to the other end of the track, and set in the July sun to dry, each tray overlapping the next by a couple of inches to keep the batch from soaking up moisture from the ground. Depending on the weather, the fruit would take up to a week to dry, then it was scraped off into the multi-useful boxes, and taken to one of the packagers in the Valley for distribution and sale.
I accompanied my mother, whose early years were filled with fruit production tasks, from before my first birthday, and went every summer until sometime in my teens. The first few years were playtime. My cousin Gail and I got Uncle John to build us a house from empty fruit boxes and trays which we would furnish with items we found, Gail (being older) ducking out to go to work as a cutter after we had settled in. Once I could reach a tray and wield a knife without presenting danger to myself or others, I too left the cozy cottage to go to work. A year or two later, I was there at seven with the rest of the family, sharing a tray and getting half the fifty cents (when I could finally cut at speed) that we were paid for each one we filled.
Gail was amazing. In my memory, she could regularly cut twenty or more trays by herself in a single day. She assumed heroic proportions in my mind. Didn’t hurt that she was also an accomplished violinist. Really didn’t hurt that when she was old enough, she learned to drive on the Maxwell touring car turned into farm vehicle, carrying the men from tree row to tree row and retrieving the full boxes of fruit. She was a kind of wonder woman to me.
Work days were filled with gossip, interesting discussion, lots of joking around, and laughter, and on a good year, vocal admiration of an especially fine apricot. When my grandmother was still living, the day was punctuated by her pitchers of fresh squeezed lemon aide, and by her lunch spreads. I would have gladly cut for free and taken the food as payment. Not that I was so bold as to offer.
One Sunday when I was maybe twelve, my folks dropped me off alone for a day’s cutting. It was the equivalent of a Bar Mitzva and Holy Confirmation rolled into one coming-of-age adventure for this kid. I cut like a demon, took few breaks, didn’t bleed on anything, and produced beautiful orderly trays for the drying yard. At the end of the day, Uncle John handed me two five-dollar bills and two more silver dollars, one Morgan Liberty and one Peace dollar. I was so excited I ran in circles until my folks came to pick me up.
I have no recollection of how those twelve dollars were spent, but it was a small fortune, and I hope I used it wisely. Probably not.
Of course, the best part of cutting was the family chatter. That’s where we got to know each other, brandishing knives and throwing pits in to small wooden boxes,where they produced a pleasing, rhythmical shplunk. That’s where I learned that these perfectly ordinary people were in fact extraordinary people, something I forgot in my mid-teens and, in some cases, failed to remember until it was almost too late.
When Grandma Lopin died, the ten acres were divided up among her sons. I’m not sure what the arrangement was exactly, but John kept farming until he sold his few acres and the house in 1974. The trees were replaced by an electrical substation and a go-cart track. I don’t blame him, tax protections for farmland had disappeared by then, and growing fruit was no longer worth the hard work. But if it were magically possible to pick up a knife and fill a tray of cots surrounded by family, I would be there in a heartbeat.