Edna was a talented gardener. She grew annuals and perennials in almost every hybrid variety available through mail order seed catalogs. Her zinnias grew as large as a child’s face and her marigold blooms were gigantic like sunflowers. She always planted fake plastic flowers in her garden too. It was her way of accepting a changing world where almost everything could be bought at the right price.
She liked to fool her friend Eva with the fake flowers. Eva visited her almost every day at her home, an old Appalachian farm. There were very few animals remaining on her farm in 1972– a few chickens clucked around as did a goat named Roger.
“Holy hell, look at these flowers, Edna! You should open a greenhouse and flower shop,” Eva said before beginning her visit ritual. While standing in Edna’s garden filled with the prettiest darn posies this side of Eden, Eva took her time and smelled every open bloom. It was a habit of hers. It gave the two friends a reason to spend so much time together, sharing gossip. She lost her senses with the sweet smell of nature right under her nose out in Edna’s garden.
Edna stood with her hoe propped under her arm pit and listened to Eva run her mouth for hours in the mid-day sun while she sniffed all the flowers, even the blossoms on the cucumber plants.
“Does she ever shut up?” Edna thought to herself as Eva rattled on about her son, Jim the game warden who protected wildlife. She liked to brag about a how darn smart he supposedly was.
Eva talked on and on as bumble bees fluttered their way around in the warm August sunshine pollinating the posies. Eva looked just like a bumble bee sometimes in Edna’s view. The constant humming from her lips was very similar to that of a bumble bee and the way she had to poke her nose against every bloom was almost obscene.
Eva bent down and placed her nose on a plastic pink rose from the Five and Dime store and flat out lied to Edna– “Oh, this one smells real good Edna!”
“Eva, you dumb- ass, that’s a plastic flower. Look at it closely,” exclaimed Edna while rolling her eyes.
“Oh Edna, you are so clever. That only goes to show how beautiful your flower garden is,” sniffed Eva.
“Eva, you talk too much. Has anyone ever told you that?”
“No! That’s because you are my only real friend. I’m going home now. I know I can be too much sometimes,” said Eva sadly.
“You are the only friend who comes to see my flowers. Talk all you want. I don’t care. You make my garden grow,” insisted Edna as she plucked a dandelion and threw it like a bad weed from her garden.
Edna and Eva were a pair who could upset the tranquility of a library simply by reading in the same room together.
They liked chasing rich old men together. They were both widows and had lots of cash in the bank. They did not spend their golden years trying to raise the dead or in church. Life was too short and they were offered a new lease on it when they found each other.
The two placed bets on who would find the richest man and marry again first. I sat in the back seat of the car licking a lollipop and listening to it all.
“I had a dream I won the lottery last night, Edna. In my dream a man who looked like Bob Barker walked up to me in the supermarket while I was shopping and handed me a cucumber with three numbers written on it– 6-4-3. I’m going to play those numbers in the lottery today and you should too. It was a sign. I’m either going to win the jackpot or finally find a man who knows how to do it right! Close your ears, Charlie,” Eva said while pointing her finger at me from the passenger seat.
“I think Bob Barker is handsome. I’m going to be on that show one day,” said Edna while glancing at her outrageous friend with frizzy hair and thick dark glasses while starting the car. She knew it was going to be a fun day at the supermarket. Eva didn’t dream that often because she was on so many pills.
“Are you sleeping better at night with that Sassafras tea I made you?” Edna asked.
“I sure am. I’m horny now too. I think you’re a witch. Those concoctions you make are down-right sinful, Edna. I hope I do see a man today at the cucumbers. I’m going to give him your phone number and tell him that you are my evil twin sister,” said Eva to her best friend playfully.
“I don’t want to marry again,” my grandmother explained. “What’s in it for me?”
“You don’t have to love him. Marry him for the money! How loaded are you anyway? Don’t think I didn’t see your ad in the ‘Daily News’ selling off ten more acres. Don’t give away your farm Edna. It’s like you are selling George’s soul when I see those ads in the real estate section.”
Edna turned left and headed up a dirt road carved into the side of a steep embankment. Layers of slate stone were stacked like piles of paper along the side of the cut cliff. Eva looked confused while glaring out the car window.
“Where are you taking me crazy broad? Edna, no! Don’t take me down Hill Valley Road! You know those steep banks scare the living hell out of me,” demanded Eva while rolling up her window and throwing away her unfinished cigarette.
“We’ll be alright, Eva. I just put new tires on this car. I want to see how they handle the road in good weather, not after it snows. Remember what happened to George when the road froze?”
Her friend remained silent until they reached the supermarket. Eva didn’t like to joke about Edna’s dead husband. Although she wasn’t religious, Eva didn’t like to taunt the dead. She believed they had control over ping pong balls in lottery ball baskets.
Eva forgot all about the bet and the Bob Barker cucumber vision after Edna drove her down Hill Valley Road. She gobbled down a pill as soon as the car started winding down the narrow dirt lane. She was fast asleep by the time we reached the supermarket.
Grandma and I didn’t wake Eva while we dashed inside to pick up a few necessities.
We did see a man who looked just like Bob Barker standing next to the cucumbers. Grandma made me promise not to tell Eva when we got back to the car but it was too late. The man with the silver hair who looked like Mr. Barker was standing on the passenger side of the car talking to Eva about the outrageous price of cucumbers.
“Did you see the way he eyed you up and down, Edna?”
“I don’t know what you are talking about.”
“For goodness sakes, Edna, have some fun. There is nothing you can do to get George back.”
“Eva, shut your trap and don’t talk about my grandson’s granddaddy in front of him like that.”
Eva gave me the evil eye and kept her mouth shut until we made it back home to the farm.
My grandmother loved to garden. Every seed that fell between her thumb and middle finger grew madly. Her potatoes were as big as footballs, green beans tasted like taffy and cabbage in her plot had not only heads but bodies.
My father introduced my grandmother and her friend Eva to a new kind of seed in May 1972. He asked Edna to plant them in her garden. We filled the trench she hoed for the seeds with two wheelbarrow loads of chicken droppings, not knowing how much impact all that digested nitrogen would have on those special seeds.
The plants were taller than her trailer. She had at least two dozen of those peculiar plants that dad asked her cultivate on his behalf.
One night in late August a deer was spotted eating the plants in Edna’s garden. She shot it from her bed out the trailer window and called the Pennsylvania Game Commission and asked them to remove the carcass from her property.
It wasn’t legal for her to kill wildlife on her farm because she wasn’t officially a ‘farmer’ but she did it anyway because her best friend Eva’s son worked for the Pennsylvania Fish and Wildlife Commission.
Dad stopped by her trailer for coffee before heading off to work that morning.
“I called the Game Commission and told them to come get that dead deer from the garden,” Edna joking informed her son while boiling large kettle of hot water—the first step in extracting her special cooking oil from the abundance of unusual produce in her garden.
“Mom, you have pot growing in your front yard. He is going to see it and you could go to jail.”
“Pot? Hell, I thought that was oregano! Oh my gawd, Barry. Hurry up, go pull it out and hide it up in the barn.”
“What are these huge holes in the ground out here, Edna?” asked Jim the game commissioner rather bravely.
Edna gave him a look as if he were still six years old and replied, “Weeds, really big weeds.”
“Do you want to show me where you put those weeds?”
She pointed to a pile of black goat pellets he was standing in and explained that Roger had eaten them. Jim shook his head and said he was going to tell his mom.
“What the hell do you think she is going to do to me? You listen to me Jimmy! I changed your diapers when your momma worked at that chicken farm out in Petersburg. You show me some respect or get off my land.”
No further questions were asked.
Jim’ mom Eva studied her Farmer’s Almanac to try and be more like her friend Edna. The yellow booklet was a roadmap for navigating through her stormy life filled with manic episodes and long periods of deep dark depression. She always knew when a full moon was on the horizon and when her third eye was about to blink. The Farmer’s Almanac sat on Eva’s coffee table next to her Holy Bible and endless supply of Lithium.
Edna turned her on to the most intriguing piece of literature published since the Bible. Eva used the book for knowing when she would start feeling horny again and when the blues were on their way. Long term weather predictions in the almanac were more reliable than weather forecasts on local radio station WHUN. The mysterious phrases in the book always granted the publisher a little room for error and it was never exact when the contents of the book’s pages spelled out periods of hot weather and the dog days of summer. Her friend Edna always planted her garden at the advice of the yellow book. The chapter on harvests was almost exact to the date and notified Eva as to when Edna’s corn on the cob would be ready for picking.
Eva used the annual publication, given to her as a Christmas gift by Edna to cast spells and enhance her knowledge of what some mountain folk considered to be work of the devil– witchcraft.
Eva kept her distance from her neighbors and for a good reason. She knew they would burn her at the stake if given the opportunity. “Get off my property you little heathen or I’ll make you grow warts,” she shouted from her kitchen window almost every day at the children who called her names and played out front on her lawn.
When the farmer’s almanac promised the last full moon of the summer her powers were in full force. Her psychic abilities were at their peek at this time and she usually won the lottery at least twice during those long bright nights.
Her sadness disappeared when the moon was high and dry. Even the kids who played on he lawn didn’t wreck her nerves when the moon was full.
She nearly fainted when she turned to page 84 in the almanac to learn that a full moon was still three days away. Her fingers were already tingling and she believed she could ‘zap’ unsuspecting residents of Huntingdon with her ungodly psychic witchcraft and put curses on them when there was a full moon.
Eva’s trembling hands caused by the lithium and a harvest moon only a few days away worked her nerves. She could hardly pick up the telephone to call her friend Edna to invite her out to Saturday night bingo at the Methodist church. She sensed strange vibes from the telephone and on days when her energy was high it was painful to make a phone call. She dialed Edna without an area code or prefix by simply sticking her finger in holes in a plastic dial and turning the numbers 5-7-0-3.
“Hello, Eva!”
“How did you know it was me? I told you people lose a part of their souls when they make phone calls. I hate all this modern technology, Edna. Do you remember what life was like before telephones? I tell you Edna, it’s the end of the world,” babbled Eva on the end of her wire.
“I knew it was you because you always call me when the moon is full. Where are you taking me– to bingo again?” Edna asked.
Eva put her hand over the end of the phone with the mouthpiece and whispered “Damned witch knows more than me.”
She returned the receiver to her full lips covered in bright red lipstick and continued– “No, I thought I would tell you about the recipe for dandelion wine I found in the farmers almanac,” replied Eva with her fingers crossed behind her back.
“You know I can’t stand those hypocrites at the church.”
Eva held the black phone receiver a few feet from her ear, knowing her friend was talking about her son Jim as Edna respectfully declined her invitation.
She taped the ear piece twice, blinked her eyes and asked again– “Are you sure?”
Edna felt a sudden tingling rush up her arm and across her forehead– a feeling she normally only felt when her friend Eva worked with her in the vegetable garden. The feeling was strange, yet alluring.
“I invited that man who looks like Bob Barker,” Eva tempted.
“I’ll come along but only because the price is right– ten cents a game and a $100 jackpot!”
“I’ll pick you up at six and I’m doing the driving!”
The two red heads never told the truth over the phone. That’s the way it was in Central Pennsylvania in 1972 when half of Huntingdon County was smoking weed.
Edna and Eva were paranoid while running their business on the top of Stone Creek Ridge and very well they should have been. Their phone conversation about bingo was referring to dandelion wine season– the last full moon of the summer which officially is the start of Fall. According to the farmer’s almanac, August 31, 1972 was the perfect day to make homemade wine.
Eva waited all year for the harvest. She managed to keep the neighbor kids from her front yard all summer long and cultivated an unusual abundance of dandelions in her front lot. Neighbors called her crazy because she stood outside for hours each day blowing those delicate feathery thistles from the caps of her yellow gems.
She was waiting for Edna to give the okay to pick them and bring them up to her farm where they could make their highly coveted and expensive concoction.
“Pick the heads of the lion now and soak them on the stove. The yellow flowers are ripe and the moon shines with the flavor of fall–” the almanac advised for August 31st.
Eva knew Edna read the words too and had a hunch this was the time for them to do their thing and mix up thousands of dollars in flower wine with a twist of what Eva called “lip balm”.
Eva didn’t even want to know what went into making the lip balm ingredient– that thick vegetable oil like substance that Edna kept in the butter compartment in her ice box.
Her only responsibility for the home based business was picking and growing the dandelions. She had no part of the illegal activity of boiling down lip balm.
“Hurry up and throw some in. I don’t want to see it. If we get arrested I’m going to insist that I knew nothing about it,” Eva shouted with a paranoid tone every fall when the special secret ingredient was mixed into the batch of homemade wine.
Eva walked right past those twelve feet tall shrubs with little green buds every time she knocked on Edna’s door. She pretended she didn’t notice them.
Funny, Edna thought, she has a conversation to tell over every flower in my garden and she does not want to discuss those beautiful green girls.
They got $100 a pint for the dandelion wine. One cap full could cure almost anything and its juices could heal chapped lips.
As soon as Edna used the code word “Bob Barker” during their phone conversation Eva ran outside with paper grocery bags and picked her dandelions. She was careful to not to miss the petals which surrounded the faces of the yellow lion– that’s what gives dandelion wine it’s shine according to Edna.
Edna’s deceased husband George was notorious for running moonshine. Corn makes not only a potent fuel which can power vehicles but also, a vodka- like drink that will burn the hair from a man’s balls if he drinks too much.
When George was still alive there was always extra cash around thanks to the big business he established down in the barn. The process was very confusing to Edna who helped him during the high season. George was always very secretive about what went into his shine and he did not allow his wife to operate the distilling contraptions.
George was funny like that– very superstitious about things and how they were made. Edna never set foot in a hospital to deliver any of the seven children she carried for him. All the kids were plucked right on the farm, with the assistance of only a midwife. George told Edna if another man ever saw her down there he’d never touch it again.
“Never touch it again? You damn fool! It’s too bad you don’t think of your moonshine like that– you drunk bastard,” she said to him each time she begged to give birth in a modern hospital facility. “Give up the moonshine George, you are not the man I married,” she pleaded.
When the money started pouring in like spring rain upon new hay, Edna was there with her man drinking a glass or two of the moonshine offering kisses and another chance at a son. Of course another ‘split-tail’ was okay with her too, no matter what George had to say about their six beautiful daughters.
She loved her daughters and so did George.
“No more kids Edna, all you have are girls. Who is going to carry on the Staub name? Six is enough!”
It wasn’t. Like a drunk Edna wouldn’t stop until she had his son.
George pumped the money he earned from bootlegging moonshine back into his farm. Almost every dime was reinvested into land at the top of Stone Creek Ridge. That was when land was cheap and there was lots of it available. George wanted to be sure he died owning more land than his father Miles.
“Taxes are going to go up every year and it’s going to get expensive just to own all this land,” Edna advised in the late ‘50s.
George had a theory about the future which justified his love for farm soil and a drink that some believed was destroying the fabrics of homes–
“The time of the farmer is coming to an end, Edna. There will soon be a day when nobody will have to work. There will be a day when the world will be one big moonshine party after another. It’s the automobile era– Edna. Just look at the world turning into one big moonshine freeway. Where are they all going so fast? I don’t know about you but I want our grandchildren to grow up in the country drinking shine, not gas!”
“The world will never work like that,” Edna insisted. “Ever since the beginning of time man has had to work hard to feed himself. It is an honest living that makes it all seem worth it.”
“Does it?” George asked while pouring his third glass.
“Of course it does. It all started when Eve ate the forbidden fruit. Living life was free and careless until Adam got his first taste of something like this,” Edna suggested while gulping down some more and pulling off her blouse because it was hot drinking shine in the midday sun.
“Why all the wars if life is designed to be lived carefree?”
“Somebody always makes a better moonshine,” Edna discovered while lying under him in the warm afternoon sun waiting for him to finish making moonshine.
Edna had to start selling parts of the farm as soon as George died. It was driving her nuts that she didn’t learn George’s secret moonshine ingredients. It pissed her off that she had to get a job at the sowing factory when her husband was killed in a car accident.
She set out with her partner and friend, Eva and a new type of seed given to her by her only son and learned how to make wine from dandelions and split-tail plant.
Edna wanted to die owning more land than her husband George and his father Miles put together.
It was a warm August afternoon in 1972 when Eva picked the most succulent dandelions ever to be made into wine. It happened to be the same day Edna was struck by lightening.
While Johnstown was flooding due to the remnants of Hurricane Agnes the red headed farm girl got zapped by a thunderbolt while outside trying to bring in her harvest inside before the storm spun over.
A deep dark cumulus cotton ball of pure tropical moisture was floating lower than the rest of the wispy clouds in the sky. They don’t get tornados on the peaks of the Appalachians often but that one looked threatening. It crept along the summit of Stone Creek Ridge like a bat flying in search of June bugs and grandma’s money maker.
The chickens were acting strange all day. Rain never kept them in their coop. The green, arm-like leaves of the field corn were turned upside down; a sure sign of a fierce impending storm. The rain tapered off briefly and Edna thought it was safe to go outside and salvage her harvest of green girls for the making of wine.
“They’re calling for 40 mile an hour winds and eight inches of rain, Edna,” her friend Eva screamed over the phone on her second phone call of the day. “You better get outside and pick those things before that God forsaken hurricane hauls ass up over that ridge you live on. I got six bags of dandelions today Edna. If we don’t get yours picked we’re not going to have very much wine to sell this year.”
“The rain and wind are not going hurt my dandelions, Eva.”
“Well, you know how they close up when the ground gets wet. Who knows how long we’ll have to wait for sunshine to open them back up. By then, my flowers will be too old for making that wine,” Eva said as the receiver of the phone shook terribly in her left hand.
She didn’t know the split-tails were already harvested and hanging in the barn. Barry had to pull them out and hide them before Jim, Eva’s son came up to our farm to do what Edna said was his ‘game commissioner job’– pull out the dead deer carcass from her vegetable garden.
After getting Eva’s call, Edna grew paranoid and started to become concerned about the crop she was drying out in the top of her old barn. There were no windows up there and those plants were very light. Yellow dandelions grow everywhere but if she lost her special weeds her life would be ruined, at least for another growing season.
She used an old rusty pitchfork to carry what was the equivalent of a bail of hay prior to bundling towards her pink trailer. She had almost made it to the door before all hell broke loose. While reaching out with her free hand to open the door, the good lord struck the red- haired devil woman with a pitch fork and sent her flying ten yards into a huckleberry patch.
It is strange how lightening works. It’s nothing like a contact high. I was walking right next to her and I didn’t feel a thing!
I knew not to call the police or the game commissioner. I pulled the split-tails inside and rescued my grandmother and her friend Eva from the eye of a hurricane.
