The Gourd from which I Drink

By Thomas James Martin
Published - Suite101 - 2001

Are you not the oasis where I dream, and the gourd from which I drink in long draughts the wine of memory? --Charles Badelaire, French poet and critic


Toward the end of October every year, my wife, Joyce, and I make our annual pilgrimage to a local "pumpkin patch." There, we join with other adults and children in a ritual ride down a muddy country lane at a local farm in the back of a tractor-pulled wagon to an even muddier field to pick a pumpkin for Halloween.

While waiting our turn to ride to the field, we enjoyed cups of warm apple cider and tried to keep warm in the chill, Autumn afternoon. The shelves of farm buildings and small open-air stands set up for the event were filled with various types of squash, Indian Corn in shades of red and blue and also gourds of every shape and color.

As I looked over the gourds this year, I was suddenly flooded with childhood memories. They were sweet, soulful memories of simpler times, of cleaning springs and drinking pure water from gourd dippers, of nesting birds and kindly ladies. The whole episode started with memories of my grandmother hollowing out gourds with a "crook neck" and leaving the dippers in the sun to season and toughen up before using them. One such dipper hung from a sapling near a remote spring that my grandfather cleaned every year.

Sometimes I would go with my paternal grandfather in late March or April to help him clean the spring of leaves and tree limbs that had fallen into the water over the fall and winter. Looking down that long path into my memory, I still see clearly the tall, oak tree that marked the site. Other than the water we carried in Mason jars, the spring was our only source of water while working in the fields and around the barns, so clearing it of brush and insuring its purity was very important to my family.

My job as a boy of six or seven was to check the gourd dipper for spider webs (and spiders), insects and small twigs and leaves. The spring was bounded by sunken boards to make a square watering place. After my grandfather had raked the spring clean, I would shake the dipper out and clean it by splashing it around in the water.

I so enjoyed watching that spring clear after it was cleaned. Water bubbled from the depths up to the surface, and if I waited long enough I would see “crawdads” and once in a while a salamander. The presence of these creatures indicated that the water was clean and pure. This is why I have always admired Robert Frost’s poem, "The Pasture," because I have lived it:

I'm going out to clean the pasture spring;
I'll only stop to rake the leaves away
(And wait to watch the water clear, I may:
I shan't be gone long. -- You come too."

Another gourd dipper hung near a spigot from which ran well water that we drank as well as used to water farm animals. It’s probably all imagination and nostalgia for a simpler life, but somehow there was nothing quite so sweet as water drunk from a gourd dipper. Of course, usually when we drank that water we were hot and tired from hard farm work. Surely, any liquid would have tasted like the nectar of the gods.

On trips to Durham to visit my grandmother, we first took a country road to Chapel Hill through the rolling, red clay hills of the North Carolina Piedmont, and sometimes we stopped at a meeting house founded by the Society of Friends in 1787. Among the ancient oak and elm trees on the grounds of the old Quaker church stands a “spring house” where yet another aging, parchment-colored gourd dipper hung.

The water from this public spring was also very pure, as evidenced by the great numbers of wasps and yellow jackets flying around the pipe from which the water continually poured. I remember my father filling the dipper with water for us, and my brother and I carefully eyeing those flying “bombers.” Even today, I always stop by that spring and taste that wonderful water when I visit the university in Chapel Hill.

I also associate gourds with a childhood neighbor. She was very much into conservation (at a time in the late ‘50’s when it was not so fashionable as now) and nature and loved birds. Tall poles from which hung rows of long-necked gourds stood in her backyard. When I visited her, she delighted in showing me all the birds living on her property in her many birdhouses. Purple Martins mostly filled the gourd aviary during the spring and summer. This lady, who had lost a son during World War II, was so kindly and thoughtful, always remembering the birthdays of the children in our country neighborhood and often baking us delicious, lemon meringue pies.

Well, we did eventually ride down a muddy country path and pick out a large orange pumpkin which Joyce turned into a smiling but still scary Jack-o'-Lantern. We also bought a rather large Butternut squash, and "to "to drink in long draughts of the wine of [childhood memories]," we also took home a rather beautiful and soulful hand-carved, gourd dipper.


Copyright 2001-2010, Thomas James Martin, all rights reserved.