Apple Butter

     

As a child I loved apple butter. Mama Shaw always had a big jar of plain ol’ Bama Apple Butter in her refrigerator, and I looked forward to it whenever we visited in Milstead.

(The empty jars above are the fancier, smaller jars from that era.)

So when my father’s parents and brothers made the long trek from Milstead to Kentucky to visit their son—a student at Asbury College, living with his wife and four children in the “GI Barracks” just off campus—they brought along a jar of that precious brown sauce especially for me.

Of all the gifts a child receives and forgets, somehow I’ve never forgotten that jar of apple butter.

There is another, less pleasant but hilarious memory from Daddy Shaw’s tales about that trip. He was a consummate storyteller. It seems that he and James both came down with a stomach bug along the way and had to make frequent emergency stops to find cover beside the mostly rural roads.

Daddy Shaw declared, in his usual tall-tale hyperbole, “I finally just pulled up a good-sized bush and strapped it to the trunk to carry with us.”

That image has stuck with me, too, for almost three-quarters of a century.

Daddy Shaw circa the late forties or early fifties.