Made of winter

Joan Clarke at The Chocolate Forest EVAN WILLIAMS/FLORIDA WEEKLY Joan Clarke's blue eyes are so cool and steady that they seem etched out of the winter landscape of her childhood.

Ms. Clarke, 75, grew up on a farm in Wisconsin, where she said her family would have been harvesting tobacco and corn this time of year. They would have been smoking pork and canning beef — and if they were lucky, and had enough sugar, making chocolate fudge.

"It was beautiful," she said. "A lot of maple trees, a lot of hills, a lot of little creeks. It's very pretty, but it's very, very treacherous in the wintertime."

Now, Ms. Clarke lives in Cape Coral. A recent chilly day was a distant echo of the bold Midwestern season she remembers. It also came along with seasonal Halloween candies made at The Chocolate Forest, a candy and cake supply store on Del Prado Boulevard. Ms. Clarke has helped manage the store, make and ship homemade chocolates and other treats, since 2002.

She also teaches a candy making class on Saturdays. Students learn to handle and mold chocolate. They make various dipped fruits and pretzels, create multi-colored chocolate lollipops and make chocolate Grenache. The class costs $25, and Chocolate Forest furnishes all the supplies. (Call 945-4949 for more information.)

"Students get to keep everything they make," Ms. Clarke said.

The truffles, toffees, jellybeans and fudges at the store — and just about every modern comfort — seem embarrassingly luxurious in contrast with Ms. Clarke's childhood.

"It was a good life, but you had to work hard," she said. "I helped in the barn at night and in the fields in the summer. Whatever the season was, everyone had to help."

Almost everything they ate was grown or produced on their land — milk, eggs, cheese and vegetables. Ms. Clarke's mother baked fresh bread. They butchered their own meat, and raised pigs to sell.

"You had to do all that stuff to make enough money to live," she said. "Money was very tight. I never had to do without anything, but I didn't have the finer things in life.

"I was born during the (Great) Depression. I had food and my mother made sure we had clothes. You didn't demand frivolous things. But we didn't miss it because we didn't have it."

Ms. Clarke remembered having "ration books" when she was in grade school, during World War II. Each member of a family was given coupons for a rationed amount of goods, such as sugar or gasoline.

"We would usually save all of our gas coupons because you needed it in the spring for the harvest," Ms. Clarke said. "Sugar we'd save for the fall when we wanted to can (fruit). I guess it was harder times than we're having now. I think people just don't know how to handle it now."

In the winter, Ms. Clarke's father would sometimes take her and her brother to school in a horse-drawn sleigh.

"Of course, the snowplow would go by, but it was just easier to take us kids across the field to the one-room schoolhouse," she said.

Ms. Clarke's mother went to a nearby town, Richland Center, Wis., about twice a month for groceries.

"She would buy a bag of oranges if she had enough money," Ms. Clarke recalled. "That would be a treat for us — me and my brother."

In fact, her favorite treat now is a candied orange rind dipped in dark chocolate.

Ms. Clarke graduated from Richland Center High School 1952. Her first job was as a telephone switchboard operator. She has also worked as a bank teller and a cashier at a supermarket. Her first husband, whom she met in high school, died of leukemia when he was 42 years old. She remarried about six years later.

"I've done a lot of things in my life," she said.

The newlywed couple saw an advertisement for property in Cape Coral in the 1970s. The ad, by Gulf American Corp., offered them a free trip to the Sunshine State. They came along with thousands of others around that time.

"We saw it in a newspaper and you came down as a promotion," Ms. Clarke said. "They wined and dined us and we put a deposit on a house in their park."

Although the couple moved back to Wisconsin in 1995, they returned to Cape Coral in 2002, and Chocolate Forest was the first place Ms. Clarke applied. She enjoys working at the candy shop and being at home.

"I'm not a partygoer," she said. "My husband and I like to go out to eat and maybe drive to Port Charlotte on a Sunday once in a while."

Twice per year, she visits her two sons, who still live in Wisconsin. They told her 122 inches of snow fell there last winter. And a customer who entered The Chocolate Forest last Monday actually shivered, coming in out of one of the first chilly days the Cape has seen in months. But Ms. Clarke appeared unfazed by the thought of any such increment weather.