Snapshot: Evelyn Losack

As I write this, I’m 30,000 feet above the ground, somewhere between New Mexico and Back East.  Wedged between my feet and the seat in front of me is a bag over-stuffed and bulging with half a bushel of Corrales apples, their fat little rounds poking out through the sides.  I’m off to see a good friend in the city whose husband’s died, and she’s just sent their one and only child off to college.  She could use a good friend right now, and some sweet Corrales harvest.

It’s the height of harvest at home, dog days settling into September.  I picked these apples from a couple of my trees I inherited in a way from my friend Evelyn Curtis Losack.  Evelyn was an old Corrales farmer, music teacher, hell-raiser, pie-baker, water-conservator, village matriarch. The list could go on, but that’s for another day.  

When Evelyn died a few years back, Ian Daitz here in Corrales went to the trouble of grafting some of her apple trees to preserve for future generations.  The fruits of that labor are the ones currently stuffed into my carry-on, including the York Imperial, a not-so-glamourous heirloom.  It’s muscular up top, but by the time you get to the butt-end it’s all wobbly with one cheek cinched up higher than the other.  Funny-looking, but charming and faithful, like a rescued stray.  Evelyn was a staunch defender of the York.  One year, the New Mexico State Fair Agricultural Competition judges told her there was no category for the York, she’d have to enter it as “Other,” but seeing how, unfortunately, with all her other heirlooms, she already had too many Others, the York was out.  Evelyn marched down the hallway of the state fair Home Economics building, York Imperial in hand, looking for the county extension agent.  “What should I do, cut down some of my trees because you don’t have that category?  People need to be educated – this is a perfect York, a maligned but perfect tree, damnit!”  After a bit more back and forth, the extension agent offered up a compromise – how about we put your York Imperial in a (non-judged) category and call it “Educational.”  Evelyn, in a rare moment, picked her battles, and scrawled out “Educational” on her York card.

The real prize, though, in this harvest bag is a small apple that when picked, dusty with a Corrales summer, can go un-noticed, so small and blushed as it is. But roll it around in your shirt tail for a minute or so and it begins to gleam and glisten fairy-tale green, the most perfect un-earthed jewel.  Your jaw aches knowing the tart rush to follow.  Evelyn called it Summer’s Prize, the first apple to appear, sometimes even as early as July, when everyone craves the coming harvest.  The Prize often came in a windfall, so Evelyn would have to find crafty ways to store and preserve it between farmers’ markets, including wetting down drapery remnants she rescued from an old bank lobby and flopping them over overflowing apple crates under the shade of the pecan tree.  The first (and free) refrigerator.  

Evelyn taught me a lot. Nothing to it but to do it.  Twist don’t pull.  We are owed nothing.  That’s the one that singes my soul, when I look around and worry about everything that I think is not going right in the world.   Drought, county assessors, development pressures, empty ditches, squash bugs.  As with many farmers, Evelyn took nothing for granted, not the water, not the sun, not the seed, not the land, not being able to sing anymore. It’s an old story, on a loop.  She’d tell how her mother, Dulcelina Curtis, and her family endured long, un-promising droughts in Corrales.  How she’d haul water out into their orchards, carrying buckets to each of their hundreds of fruit trees, trying to keep them alive.  

Looking down at this bag of apples I’m hauling halfway across the country, and everything that went into growing it and bringing it to the table, and I gotta wonder, wouldn’t it just be easier to stop at the Albertson’s once in town and pick some stuff up.  What’s it all for? 

Keep the faith with all this, honey.  That’s one of the last things Evelyn said to me and made me promise as she was dying.  

Bring your gifts into the world, care for them as best you can, and share the harvest.  

I’ll take this little part of Corrales to my friend. A summer’s prize. 

By Stacia Spragg-Braude, Corrales photographer and writer, author of “If There’s Squash Bugs in Heaven, I Ain’t Staying:  Learning to Make the Perfect Pie, Sing When You Need To, and Find the Way Home with Farmer Evelyn” Photo Credit Corrales Historical Society