When Joy and I were first married and had our first child, Camille, we didn’t have a lot of money.
Joy and I had just finished college at Southwest Missouri State, in Springfield, Mo. We had already been through Hurricane Camille (another story) and were living in a huge mobile home ten foot wide and forty foot long in Arnold, Mo. 
The trailer we were living in was large compared to the travel trailer we had been living in earlier; an eight foot wide by thirty foot long “Spartan” aluminum travel trailer. We had lived in the Spartan travel trailer with a cat for almost two years.
While we were in college we lived on about one hundred and sixty dollars a month. Most of which was seventy five dollars a month rent for trailer pad and utilities, the rest went for tuition and books for college.
We did everything to save money and make money during our early marriage. We picked blackberries, went fishing, even collected black walnuts to sell in the fall. Things were tight and we tried to scrimp at every corner.
One late fall Joy and I came up with the idea of making persimmon jam to can and use throughout the winter. There were a lot of persimmon trees around our home and we thought that if we would only pick the soft, ripe ones that were sweet, the jam would be tasty and also make good Christmas presents.
You do know that there is a specific time to pick persimmons? If you pick the persimmons before they are ripe and soft, they have a bitter, alum taste, make your mouth pucker and it will feel like the enamel was taken off your teeth.
