The Nuanced Flavours of Summer

An apricot is stable, a point of relative constancy amid a sea of activity.  It is neither sunrise nor sunset, but the noontide sun in fullest flame, directly overhead, on one of the hottest days of the year.  An apricot is wonderful, a slightly sweet smell and the taste as of nectar on the tongue under the shade of its progenitor in that blistering starlight.  An apricot has a place, and for me the locations that thrill with the concept of “apricot” are Grand Forks, for history, Savona, for exploration, and Lower Nicola, home, for stability.

I sat on a couch, wondering.  Why would you want a hard pillow? Great-aunt Julia said it was filled with apricot pits.  I turned my attention to the dried apricots offered from the racks above the big woodstove.  Harder but with a better taste than the storebought dried apricots with their oniony aftertaste, which I was later found are treated with sulfur dioxide for colour and quality preservation.  Grand Forks, home of our nearest relatives, was a regular destination in spring and fall during my childhood.  Sister, father, mother and I would drive the four or five hours to see great-aunt, great-uncle and cousins.  This was also where we received some of our best apricot trees, whether through seed or sapling.  My history with apricots travels a long road from the cool spring of the Kootenays to the heat of Savona.

In my mind, Savona is a place locked in summer.  When we dropped by in winter it seemed cool and still.  In hot weather, Savona is livelier, locals splashing in the shallows of Kamloops Lake and a few clouds drifting slowly through the blue sky.  From Lower Nicola we followed Guichon Creek past numerous lakes: Mamit, Logan, and Tunkwa.  Reaching the high point, we would descend on gravel and later, paved roads past Mount Savona and Mount Durand along Durand Creek.  Kamloops Lake was a broad vista of blue opening up below us on a clear day.

Several apricot trees are scattered around Savona, their orange fruit a delight to the eyes when they ripen in July.  A few already litter the ground, and after a swim comes time to pick some apricots.  No one is responsible for picking the bounty of fruit by the school.  Their character varies surprisingly by place – in a good year buckets can be gleaned from these places, the schoolyard ones bursting with flavour, a juicy flesh with an ethereal summery taste.  Months later, apricots in jam or frozen form cannot match this flavour.  Near the railroad, a stunted tree grows near a culvert, dropping its smaller fruit.  Faint bitterness sometimes clouds these, yet most years they are just as good as or better than the others, packing a wallop of flavour into a fruit the size of a ping pong ball.  We hoist the buckets into our small pickup and make our way with open windows back through the highlands.  A farmstead with solar panels near Tunkwa Lake looks to have a few trees, even at higher elevation.  I always wonder whether they produce anything.  Before long, we’re back on our side of this little plateau, hot wind streaming through the open windows of the truck.

At the end of the day, we make it back to our home, pulling in past our own apricot trees.   Much like the sense of terroir often referenced in grape-growing, each tree has its characteristic fruit.  I feel that the trees have a sense of identity, something intangible.  For me it is a mental construct taking into account their location, origin, fruit, height and form.  Some are easy to describe, like a Siberian apricot, whose fruits are next to inedibly bitter, or one of the first that we grew, a commercially grafted tree.  The fruits of this tree are edible but always slightly mealy and less flavourful than those from homegrown trees.  They nonetheless make good bulk for adding to jam.  Nearer the house are a few smaller trees, these surely grown from seeds we threw into the flowerbed.  They scrape along the walls of the house when the wind blows, and in recent years have begun to make fruit of their own, heavy orange golf balls that are so juicy as to drip onto the ground when picked at full ripeness.

Outside of summer, the rest of the year is varied, but also beautiful.  May is a time of happiness and a time of worry.  It is a pivotal month for the fruit trees at home.  The neighbourhood is some distance above Guichon Creek’s meandering path toward the Nicola River.  The north-south valley is dominated by our Interior friends, Ponderosa Pine and Bluebunch Wheatgrass.  May is a time when many flowers bloom and the last frosts come.  But it is these very frosts that can kill our hopes of a good apricot harvest for another year.  There’s little we can do; the trees are too tall to cover and we don’t wish to install a giant fan.  We hope and wait.  When the frosts stop we know our luck.  The apricots will be abundant this year, or they will not.

Before May comes, we spend our winter not ignoring, but largely leaving the apricot trees alone.  We eat the jam made from them in previous summers and stew the frozen ones for some warm-season fruit in a colder time.  At times, we recall how laden the branches were the previous summer.  One tree in particular had its branches propped up on sawhorses so they wouldn’t break.  We prune some branches here and there to keep the trees in a semblance of order.  Otherwise little happens in the winter.  A discussion might arise about the pronunciation of the first syllable of the word.  Is it āpricot, with an ‘eh’ sound, or is it äpricot, with an ‘ä’ sound?  The quarrel is moot if we speak in Berndeutsch, a dialect within Swiss-German; in this language, the sound is ‘ah,’ as in aprikosen or aprikosä.

Spring passes quickly in the drylands.  The snows still fall sporadically until April, albeit melting away before the afternoon shadows lengthen.  The rains sometimes continue into summer, but the apricots flower in May, pinkish or white in the corner of our yard.  Their buds hold if the frost is kind, and before long the garden is gregarious green, crowded with all manner of vegetables.  Potatoes bow to fast-growing radishes, which will be long gone before the starchy tubers are dug up.  In the small orchard the asparagus peek out and then disappear onto our plates, red fruits later manifesting on the spindly branches of the ones that have grown tall.  After the summer is gone and the last apricots picked or consumed by ants, autumn arrives and in its short splendour lights up the orchard with red from the plum tree and yellow-orange from the apricot trees.  The season of growth has finished, but the year never ends for the plants of our yard.

References

Brüning, G., I. Haase, R. Matissek, and M. Fischer. 2011. Marzipan: Polymerase Chain Reaction-Driven Methods for       Authenticity Control. Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry 59: 11910-11917.

Malik, S.K., R. Chaudhury, O.P. Dhariwal, and S. Mir. 2010. Genetic diversity and traditional uses of wild apricot (Prunus armeniaca L.) in high-altitude north-western Himalayas of India. Plant Genetic Resources: Characterization and Utilization 8: 49-257.

Ruml, M., D. Milatović, T. Vulić, and A. Vuković. 2011. Predicting apricot phenology using meteorological data. International Journal of Biometeorology 55: 723-732.