Shine On

Yesterday, I decided to have a day to myself and visit a spot that I used to hit once or twice a year, especially around Christmastime to gift shop for my wife. I hadn’t visited the place in about two or three years. It used to be a Red & White store on Route 30, just west of Ligonier. After the grocery store closed it became an antique flea market. It was a wonderful place to stroll through and take in all of the items from the past. Anything and everything graced the shelves. It was a marvelous building to wander through as I tried to decide if the item that caught my interest was something that I wanted, needed, or could afford.

I climbed into my car and dreamed of exploring the store and browsing through the accumulated oddities. The trip through the drizzle did little to dampen my anticipation. When I got to the location, the entire building was missing. It had been torn down. My heart fell. I turned around and drove back to Ligonier to satisfy another craving. I ate lunch at Ruthies, a small diner to the east of Ligonier on Route 30. I wasn’t disappointed. The food was great.

Back home, I decided to rest and allow my food to digest. Feet up, I snapped on the television. Moonshiners popped up. It was a session I hadn’t seen before and watched it to the end. It did bring to memory of an incident from Connellsville Senior High School. For the next day in chemistry lab, my lab partner and I were to do a distillation project. I knew I had elderberry juice stored in a quart Mason jar for nearly a week and thought it would make a proper distillation liquid. Sure enough, the jar was still there smelling a bit yeasty. Perfect. I smuggled it into school and then into the classroom.

After setting up the Bunsen burner and glass tubing for the distillery, I eased the lid off the jar and unobtrusively poured the juice into the glass “pot,” fired up the Bunsen burner, and waited. Controlling the heat was the most difficult. The temperature fluctuated, but soon we had a distillate dripping from the coil and collecting in another beaker. Because we were unsure of the “purity” of the distillate, we decided to distill it again. The second time, we controlled the heat much better.

My partner said, “Do you think we should taste it?” But before I could answer, our instructor said, “I’ll take that, boys.” So I don’t know whether we achieved liquor, what proof it was, or if even it was palatable or not.