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Over the course of my lifetime, I think it fair to say that my relationship with the month of August has been of a decidedly mixed nature. As a boy the situation was one of love-hate. I loved the lazy days the month brought, with katydids playing their winsome fiddles like there was no tomorrow, with Joe Pye weeds beginning to bloom and attract tiger swallowtails, with catfish biting as if somehow they knew winter’s hard times lay but a few months down the road, and with all of the bounty of a spring and summer’s work in long rows of corn and other parts of the garden gracing the family table. More of that in a moment.

Similarly, August meant that it was time to start letting our beagles do some rabbit chasing in the cool of night, toughening them up for the coming of cottontail season. The mere thought of hunting also reminded me that squirrel season would open in two months. It was a time when the trout streams, often crowded in late spring and early summer, were pretty much devoid of anglers. A boy like me could set out by shank’s mare, with a hearty lunch in his wicker creel, and at least on week days have every expectation of never seeing another angler. For a lad who loved solitude (and still does) that was pure heaven.

Then too, there was the food side of the equation mentioned above. Daddy always raised a big garden, and Grandpa Joe grew even more. The idea was to raise enough “garden truck” for canning, drying, and preserving to last right through fall and winter. Nor should I fail to mention leftovers for fattening hogs and feeding chickens. The list of the fruits and vegetables they grew is a long one, and although I’m going to give it a try simply because tickling that fond memory gives me joy, I know beyond doubt I’ll overlook some things. Spring brought asparagus (a perennial kept it good form by periodic applications of chicken manure, always being careful because it’s so rich too much of it will burn up crops), onions (both the multiplying kind and bulbs planted about as soon as the soil could be worked), new potatoes, lettuce (black-seeded simpson), spinach, mustard and turnip greens, green peas, cabbage, and chard. Some of these cool-weather crops, most notably cabbage and turnips, would have a second go-round in the fall. There were strawberries to be picked, although we relied on wild ones, finding them tastier by far than their comparatively insipid domestic cousins, and rhubarb for sauce and pies. That’s a pretty impressive list of spring fixin’s, especially when you realize it was supplemented by provender from the wild such as poke salad, ramps, branch lettuce, dandelion greens, and other edibles.

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Serious gardening, however, was reserved for fruits and vegetables which grew and were harvested in the summer months and on into autumn. August loomed mighty large in this regard, because in the North Carolina high country it was the time of year for putting up, putting by, laying in, laying by, canning, and drying. If you are not familiar with those terms, they all involve, in one way or another, preserving food from summer’s bounty for use in the months to come. There would be lima beans, butter beans (our term for a small type of lima), green beans (pole beans, half runners, creasy beans, and bunch beans), okra, tomatoes (red, yellow, and tommytoes), crookneck squash, crowder peas (also known as field peas, zip peas, and clay peas), eggplant, pickling cucumbers and those for eating (they were in truth interchangeable but a special type which produced more or less uniform sizes were favored for bread-and-butter and dill pickles), and other vegetables. Throw in blackberries and dewberries from the wild and tame raspberries, along with early apples, muskmelons, watermelons, cantaloupes, and honeydew melons, and you had to most of it.

Yet the ultimate crop, the one which demanded more space and harder work, was corn. In many senses, corn was THE staple of mountain life. It could be enjoyed in so many ways as almost boggle the mind—fresh it provided roastin’ ears, creamed corn, gritted and fried or made into fritters, and truly roasted (roastin’ ears as I knew them were boiled). Dried it could be parched, but mostly it was ground into meal and that opened up a whole new world or ways to enjoy corn—cornbread, buttered grits, grits with gravy, fried grits cakes, corn dodgers, corn johnny cakes, mush, and more. Cornbread was a staple of my boyhood meals, served hot with plenty of butter ready for slathering at dinner (the mid-day meal) then eaten cold at supper (with sweet milk, butter milk, or maybe sorghum syrup. Add the corn which went into soup mix—a major part of the canning effort that combined tomatoes, okra, peas, beans, and corn—and you get a decent idea of the primacy of corn. Of course it shouldn’t be forgotten that a big patch of Hickory Cane was raised every year for fattening hogs and feeding chickens. Hickory Cane was a tall, highly productive variety of corn which also was favored in some quarters for the illicit manufacture of tanglefoot (if you don’t recognize that word try synonyms such as golden moonbeam, anti-snakebite medicine, squeezin’s, or white lightning).

Nor was the usefulness of corn limited solely to the grains which meant so much to Native Americans long before the arrival of the first Europeans. All parts of the plant were utilized. Fodder fed cattle and hogs; stalks did double duty by offering a ready means of climbing for crowder peas, pole beans, or October beans; and in the fall shocks made from the stalks not only stood ready to do duty as winter livestock feed; they also were a prime place for storing things such as turnips, pumpkins and maybe even apples, providing protection from the cold and critters alike. Girls sometimes made dolls from shucks, and many a mountain household (although this was largely before my time) found corn shuck mattresses comfortable enough.

Looking back, I guess the versatility of corn justified the seemingly endless work it required--plowing before planting, seeding (four seeds to the hill), thinning after it was up four or five inches (leaving two plants to the hill), hoeing, and harvesting. Invariably there would be a run-in or two with packsaddles, a type of caterpillar which will sting the bejeebers out of you on contact, and for some reason yellow jackets found corn patches a mighty fine place for building their subterranean nests. A late summer run –in with them could be a painful experience indeed.

Skipping to the present, I enjoyed corn-on-the-cob twice today and Ms. Ann put up creamed corn just this morning, knowing that one of the big freezer packets will be a “must have” part of our family meals at both Thanksgiving and Christmas. Corn fed my mountain forebears, feeds me, and remains a staple of high country life, at least in traditional rural areas, to this day.

That’s a lot of words to explain the love part of my love-hate relationship with August, but make no doubt about it; the month has its negative aspects. First and foremost, at least when I was a boy, was the fact that time to go back to school lay right around the corner. That meant returning to an orderly existence, no more going barefooted, the sudden burden of homework every night, freedom only on the weekends, and an end to summer’s endless opportunities for carefree adventure. Then there’s the heat and humidity, the pervasive sense of atmospheric oppression, which helps explain why the word doldrums is often associated with August’s dog days. I use the present tense because I didn’t notice such things as a boy, maybe because there was always a creek nearby for a cooling dip or a watermelon awaiting some serious gustatory attention. My has that changed!

Each morning when I come in from a couple of hours of working in the garden or yard, drenched with sweat and bearing a skeeter bite or two, I can’t help but think about how age has taken its toll on my outlook. Old Havilah Babcock, one of our great sporting writers and the man I consider to be the poet laureate of the bobwhite, knew what he was talking about when he wrote “boyhood improves with age, and the more remote it is the nicer boyhood seems to become.” I reckon I’m sufficiently remote for it to seem mighty fine, or maybe I’ve finally rolled around to appreciating just how blessed I was as a youngster.

Other negatives to August include the increasing number and prevalence of yellow jackets (goodness knows how often I’ve had bad encounters with these rascals as a boy and man), a certain sense of lassitude which I can’t describe in words but which seizes the soul (or at least mine) this time of year, the month’s tendency to be quite dry (after July here, mind you, we could use a spot of desert-like weather), and a “hurry up and wait” air about everything which makes it seem like hunting season (and fall) will never arrive.

Still, when August has arrived opening day of dove season can’t be too far away, and if you are much of a dreamer at all thoughts readily turn to the month which can make a mighty pitch for being the best of all—October. Meanwhile, let’s end with some recipes, simple yet most satisfying, which focus on the sort of foods, from the wilds and the garden, associated with August.