Visitors filled the square while I walked toward the old iron kettles, and I smelled it from thirty feet out, and it stopped me where I stood.
Scorch.
Apple butter in a copper kettle over wood will go from perfect to ruined in about ninety seconds, and it does not announce itself in the color first. It announces itself in the smell, and then it is already at the bottom, and then you have eighty gallons of nothing.
There were four young people around kettle two with a paddle each and none of them were reading the bottom.
You do not stir apple butter. You keep the paddle on the bottom and you do not lift it, ever, for eleven hours, and you change hands and you change people but you never change the contact.
I did not ask anybody. I took the paddle out of a boy’s hands and I said, sorry, son, and I got down on the bottom and worked it and we saved about two thirds of that kettle.
The coordinator came over. I want to be fair to her. She is thirty-one, she was handed a volunteer roster and a mandate to freshen it up, and she had never in her life stood at a kettle.
She asked me how they were supposed to know.
So I walked her over to the fire shed and showed her the card. It is tacked inside the door, typed, water-stained, and it has been on that wall since 1974 when the Ladies Auxiliary put the festival back together after the flood.
Times, ratios, the sugar in thirds, the copper versus the iron. And down at the bottom, under all of it, one line that is not a measurement.
Keep the paddle on the bottom. If your arms give out, hand it to somebody who has done it before and let them show you, and next year you be the one who has done it before. That is the only way this thing gets to be a hundred years old.
She read that standing in a shed with her hands in her jacket pockets and she did not say anything for a good while.
I stirred until two in the morning. So did she. She has a burn on her forearm she is very proud of.
This year there are nineteen of us at the kettles and eleven of them are under thirty, and I have taught every one of them the bottom, and two of them are better at it than I am and I have told them so.
My apron came back out of the lost-and-found box. She had it washed and it went in a frame in the fire shed next to that card, which I told her was ridiculous and I meant it.
There is a rotation list now with names and years on it, and mine says 1997, and hers says the year she got that burn.
Twenty-eight years of a thing does not live in a volunteer roster. It lives in a hand that knows when to keep the paddle down, and there is exactly one way to pass that on, and it is not from scratch.