Jam Don't Shake Like That

The alchemy of jelly is deceptively simple: combine nearly equal parts fruit and sugar, add pectin, heat, and put the hot syrup in jars. Days, sometimes weeks, later it will set into a sweet treat. If it fails to gel, which it sometimes does, the cook can boil again; if not, the liquid still can be used as a topping on pancakes.

At holiday get-togethers and after Christmas dinner this year I will casually hand out jars of spiced grape jelly, cherry jam, apple butter, mountain currant jelly, and fig confiture with honey, lemon, and thyme. Most will be eaten just as casually. Some jars will sit on pantry shelves for years. In rare cases a friend will return an empty jar, holding it like a chalice and asking for more of the same. No matter which scenario plays out, making and giving these goods is a ritual that brings me great pleasure.

My first jelly was Mamoo's spiced grape. The recipe came from my great-grandmother, and I copied it by hand from my grandmother's hand-written copy. My grandmother must have learned from her mother-in-law. I like to imagine the two of them forging a friendship over a sticky sweet boiling pot in a hot summer kitchen. My grandmother taught my mother, who then passed the knowledge to me. I don't remember learning, although I do remember my mother's warnings as she melted paraffin on the gas stove - the wax could ignite and engulf the kitchen in flames. She would pour a thin layer on top to seal each jar, and months later I would pry them open, then chew the grape-flavored wax. Today I use a boiling water bath to preserve, but the rest is mostly the same. I've now made spiced grape so many times I can do it mostly from memory, although I occasionally review the original recipe in case I'm missing anything. I usually am, but my variations have made it my own, so I don't go back. Like language, recipes evolve through the generations.

I can make spiced grape any time because the primary ingredient is store-bought juice. Fresh fruit, however, dictates its own schedule. This year I discovered that my uncle had a cherry tree with a good crop, and I was given permission to pick both his tree and the neighbor's.  Montmorency cherries are a rare treat since my mother's tree split along a fault line and was turned into sweet firewood. For many years the last week of July was harvest time, and I would clamber on the low moss-covered fence underneath, or ascend awkwardly placed ladders reaching for the ripest fruit, too tart to eat off the tree but unequalled for pies and jam. My uncle's tree ripened early, in mid-June, so while my children were at camp I spent a week's worth of mornings circling the tree. Looking up through the trees the sun was so bright that the fruit was translucent, glowing red against the deep blue sky. Sticky juice ran down my arms to my elbows and squirrels chittered at me from a nearby tree while robins scolded from another. There were so many that even after taking more than two gallons the tree looked as if I hadn't touched it. At home I commenced preparing the fruit. I washed and pitted and chopped, boiled and canned. After three days I had twelve jars of jam, and two pies in the freezer. My house smelled of sugar and cherries for days.

Apples ripen later, in September and October. I get mine through a school fundraiser, so the spicy scent of apple butter has become synonymous with the start of school. Apple butter is an exercise in patience. Forty pounds of apples take a while to prepare - washing, peeling, coring, chopping. The peels and cores go into the mix, too, for their pectin, but they are contained in a muslin bag to be removed later. When ready the apples are set to simmer over low heat for days, until they break down just enough. The scent of the harvest drifts through the house, growing stronger as the hours pass. Falling steam coats the counter with evaporated sugar, and the essence of cinnamon and cloves imbue every meal until the chocolate-colored mixture is pressed through a fine sieve, scooped into jars, and the aroma is sealed in.

The rarest, most precious, jelly comes from the currants that grow at Wellington Lake. The bushes are waist high; the berries smaller than the nail on my pinkie finger. An hour of picking might yield eight ounces of berries, and it takes 16 cups to make one batch of six jars. The arithmetic is daunting. Yet there's a certain satisfaction to the first dry plink of fruit hitting the bottom of a paper cup, then the deepening sound as the cup fills to silence. 

Last weekend I stood on a low hill, dry grasses scratching and tickling my calves as I picked, ducking to discover orange-red berries under tiny green fan-shaped leaves. The breeze came from the south, curving around the shoulders of Castle Mountain and gusting pieces of conversation from the campers across the lake to me. "Don't worry about . . ." "Did you . . .?" Dogs barked and radios sang intermittent love songs to me. It was comforting. This sun lowered itself as I hunted for fruit, and my fingers became increasingly sticky with the piney cologne of currant resin. I remembered walking the dusty road with my mother and grandmother, each with our own collecting cup, remarking on good bushes and chatting amiably as we worked them over, or relaxing into companionable silence, moving individually to the next spot. Other days we slipped down the rough gravel of the dam, looking for disturbed earth where raspberries grow best. When we found a patch we would wind our arms between thorns to find tiny magenta thimbles that fell into our hands. Ostensibly for mixed wild berry jelly, my raspberries usually were a snack instead. Entire afternoons slid by as we attained a meditative state of grace, the reward a full measuring cup in the refrigerator and the knowledge that this year we would have jelly.

This is a good year for currants, and my children helped with the harvest. S, as usual, chattered away. Miss Awesome -- like three generations of women before her -- focused on picking. During the week I left them at the cabin with their grandmother while I returned to the city for two days to work. When I returned there were quarts of currants in bags in the refrigerator. My mother should be able to make two batches this year.

The alchemy of jelly is deceptively simple: combine the fruits of my labor with generations of tradition, flavor with love, and share.

Reunion Redux: Once More, With Feeling!

I have posted a few (okay, several) times about my abiding sense of awkwardness and loneliness. This was particularly true at last year's UWC reunion. Nonetheless, I felt compelled to go again this year, largely because I wanted to see my first-year roommate, of whom I have fantastic warm memories. I am very glad I went. At the end of the weekend I said goodbye and embraced everyone, relishing the knowledge that twenty years and thousands of miles have not diminished our friendships. 

This year has been one of transformation for me. Having begun my personal fitness odyssey, I am no longer as overwhelmingly ashamed of my physical self. I have revisited my priorities, and am working to take care of my emotional health. I have learned to speak in the gibberish of self-help gurus.

Perhaps that's why with this group I didn't feel the need to try so very hard to impress. I was delighted to meet up with my roomie and several other people I really liked then, and still like now. We laughed, we wrote together, we reminisced. There were many hugs. It was good. I also spent time alone, enjoying the beautiful weather and some much-needed solitude. And I danced until my feet ached, joyous in the company of dear friends.

Like last year there were a number of scheduled activities, most of which I skipped this time around. One in which I did participate was a remembrance ceremony. Walking to the  garden felt like approaching a funeral, especially when I saw boxes of tissues at the end of each row of folding chairs. Still, there was a certain peacefulness sitting under the pine trees, listening to the low murmur of voices dulled by the wind in the top boughs.

Below the bright blue sky we honored benefactors I never knew, and mourned classmates I  wished I'd known better. Mourners spoke of the friendships forged at the school, and the lives changed by them. And, during a passionate speech in which he expressed his gratitude for the school, his now-deceased parents, and the twenty years of students he has taught, a marvelous teacher spoke about how honored he has been to love and be loved his students. One line rang through me like a bell: "it is easy to give love. It is difficult to receive it".

For more than twenty years I have mistrusted most affection I have been offered. Believing that I would be mocked or somehow humiliated if I responded, I practiced diffidence and deflection. I was fine offering myself, giving of myself, but I read sinister intent behind the most casual, unintentional slights. And I have missed out. I I know now that my fear came from a lack of self-worth, and I am trying to change my thinking. I will continue to give. Now I must learn to receive.

This morning I woke from a dream in which I was hurrying to catch a bus for which I was desperately late. Instead of feeling frantic and guilty, though, I grinned and hurried and just managed -- awkwardly dragging a suitcase and stumbling through doors -- to make it on board. I looked around and saw dozens of people I have known (including those I'd just seen at the reunion), all smiling. In the past I would have understood them to be mocking my ineptitude. In my dream, though, as I searched for an open seat, everyone was gesturing eagerly for me to join them. As I flopped down in the nearest available space I laughed, filled with delight at the love and friendships that surrounded me.

High Desert - A Word Picture

This is a shadowless land. There is an austere beauty here that demands respect, although to one accustomed to the lush greenery of a wet climate admiration comes slowly, tempered by the knowledge that there is no forgiveness.

The sky stretches taut from horizon to horizon, shading from a white that follows the sun to blue so deep it seems like space itself. Clouds are architectural wonders, stacked in brilliant towers that make unfulfilled promises of rain. The land shimmers in low waves of gold, touched by browns and greens subtly blended so that crests and hollows are defined by color, rising to pale yellow and darkened to dusty greens wherever water settles in minuscule amounts. Mountains slump on the western horizon, so confident in their grandeur that they have no need to stand tall. Buttes occasionally jut up lonesome in the plain as if they were misplaced when the mountains rose.

This landscape is defined by the absence of water. Travellers in times past mapped out tiny springs and moved between them like children on hopscotch boards. Missing one could mean death, scattered bones beside a trail the only marker. Some learned the thorny secret to pulling water from desert plants, but even the prickly pear is stingy; sage and grass give up nothing. The harshness of the plants is belied by the musicality of their names: ocotillo, agave, juniper, sage, broom, brush, yucca.

Waterways are hidden in gullies, arroyos, ravines, and gulches -- words that, like the clouds, evoke dreams of torrential rain. Rare creeks are scribed in dark green twists across the bright land: the brushy tops of trees that rise tentatively above the plain. There one can descend into the cool shade of hundred-year-old cottonwoods, unkempt grandfathers whose spring seeds fly like false snow. The moist air in a cottonwood grotto is perfumed by leaf mulch and the smell of ancient rain drawn up through ten million years of geology.

The asphalt bleaches to the light gray of old bones, running straight for a hundred miles. Telephone poles impose an angular regularity on the scene, the lines between rising and falling with meditative grace. Lordly hawks perch occasionally on the wires or swing in high circles on invisible thermal columns. Barbed wire fences -- no sharper than the cactus they separate -- line both sides, hemming in cattle in shades of brown, grazing industriously. Occasionally they are joined by startling black brethren that look like standing shadows. The same expanses sometimes conceal pronghorn, camouflaged with unpredictable bands of brown and white. They stand aloof from the domesticated beasts, masters of the land and dismissive of fences and human boundaries.

Occasionally thunderstorms sweep across the plain with cinematic drama. Clouds pile upon each other in a symphony of grays -- blue, green, pink, dove -- their shadows racing across the land faster than the swiftest of horses. Sheets of rain drop earthward, blown much like laundry on the line, concealing and revealing the land below. Lightning, jagged in every direction, highlights the landscape and brightens inside the clouds so that their glow is reminiscent of atomic blasts. The plains open up to the redemption of rain, and the water-carved channels fill quickly with roiling mud, racing as far as possible even as the liquid begins to sink into the sand below.

Within minutes the rain passes and again this antique land shines without shadow below the indifferent sun.

Lucky Number Seven

This weekend we'll be celebrating Miss Awesome's seventh birthday. She's super excited. I'm a little conflicted. As we were running errands yesterday she was wearing "high heels" (about an inch) and a dress that's starting to get too short. I turned around and nearly fell over with astonishment at the preview of a gorgeous, leggy, teenager stalking along. Then she came up and held my hand and for a little while she was my baby again.

Miss Awesome is not an easy child, nor has she ever been. In her first couple of months she never wanted to be put down, and it was only thanks to a wonderful cadre of women -- Aunt Peg, Grammy Vi, and Mimi in particular -- who took turns toting her around Vermont that I was able to function those first three months. As a toddler she fought tooth and nail when we stopped carrying her. She spent hours sitting on floors, wailing because she wanted me to pick her up, and I just had to wait her out. We were tortured by defiant screaming whenever she was buckled into her car seat. I had to take away her dresses for a year when she refused to wear underwear. More recently I took away all her toys when she wouldn't clean her room.

Will gets extraordinarily upset by her defiance, and we both struggle to redirect her energy from anger to something more positive. Nonetheless I am astonished by and grateful for her spunk. True, Miss Awesome regularly renders me speechless with frustration, but still I look at her and see someone absolutely amazing. She has a truly indomitable spirit, and I can only imagine what she will do with it. Too often I see girls who are meek and quiet and nice. Miss Awesome is not, and hopefully never will be, nice. She is proud and strong and confident and intense and powerful. She is beautiful and determined and strong-willed and creative.

She is a gift.

This weekend we celebrate the anniversary of her birth, but in my heart I will be celebrating my good fortune in being her mother.

Small Town, Big City

I grew up in a small town of just over 3,000 people in the 1980s. It was pretty idyllic. There's some truth to the depiction of small towns in the media. Everyone really does know everyone else. We left the doors unlocked, and never needed to knock at the neighbor's house. The town cops ticketed me once for failing to signal a right-hand turn -- on my bicycle! Because it was such a small community, we also were very close-knit. When I was in elementary school our town was devastated by an industrial accident which killed 15 men. Nearly everyone in our class lost a relative or friend. The town rallied, as it always does, with memorial services and fundraising potlucks in the park.

My parents still live in their house in the center of town. I go back several times a year and am astonished each time by how much it has grown. More than 6,500 people live there now, and there are new suburban style developments whose residents don't really mix with the old timers. But the heart is still there. When I run to the grocery store I am always greeted by the manager, for whom I used to work a lifetime ago. My mom keeps me updated on the local gossip, and keeps everyone there posted on my life so when we run into each other conversation continues like I never left. I fled because the town was too small, but I miss that closeness now.

Today I live in a big city where the metropolitan area population numbers in the millions. We have every amenity, convenience, and opportunity a modern American city can offer. I love it. I love the anonymity. I also love the variety and number of people. When there are only a couple hundred kids around, and everyone has roughly the same background and interests, making friends as the odd kid is not easy. With so many people to choose from it's been a little easier for me to find a fit, and I'm hoping it works that way for my kids, too.

Still, there's a special kind of security in a small town. People watch out for each other. So I was pleased and grateful the other day when I realized that my neighborhood really is a small town inside the big city. I know all the grocery store clerks by name and chat with them about their kids and gardens. I run into folks I know on the street and we say a quick hello. There's a neighborhood group on facebook where people can ask for the name of a good window cleaner, or hear about a burglary. On our block in particular all the kids roam from house to house, playing across half-a-dozen front yards just as I did when I was their age.

We went to the neighborhood 4th of July parade this year. It ran for blocks and blocks, and had marching bands and local politicians. Kids decorated their bicycles and swerved along, shepherded by watchful parents and bystanders. Fire engines ran their sirens and kids scrambled for candy -- just like we did years and years ago. It was a small town moment in my big city, and it felt like home.

Why Write?

A friend commented recently that what I write is very personal, but my medium is very public. I think she's quietly concerned that I am making myself vulnerable. She's right. But I've always been told to write what I know, and the only things I know are what are in my head and in my heart.

So why write? I guess first because I can't not write. Its something I've done all my life -- poetry, essays, short stories. Life makes more sense to me when it's on paper. Dark thoughts and feelings evaporate when released into the ether.

There's more to it, though. I believe that in the grand scheme of things I may be unique but not particularly special. That's not a bad thing. It's just that I'm not a celebrity or political figure or leader of some sort worth noting, and therefore whatever I write may be meaningful only to a very small circle of friends and acquaintances. In addition, I believe that people are fundamentally the same, especially those with similar experiences. I find solace on our commonality, and perhaps my little essays will be a touchstone for someone else, somehow.

Finally, there's a sort of validation in the comments and responses I get. When I hear that something I wrote touched someone, or made her laugh until she cried, I can glimpse for a moment the many strands of of the tapestry that weaves us all together.

I Walk The Line

My stomach clenched as I bought a doll this past weekend. Julie, an American Girl doll, to be precise. Miss Awesome has been asking for an AG doll for more than a year now. The longing started when she was given a pair of hand-me-down AG-type dolls by a friend who had "upgraded" to the real thing. She immediately began planning for "when I get my real American Girl doll". I explained how expensive they were, and how I didn't see the need, especially since she had two dolls almost exactly like an AG. But that didn't end it. We (Grammy) tried at Christmas to appease her with another 18 inch doll by Madame Alexander, but apparently girls of a certain age know and note the difference.

Miss Awesome has been unwavering in her goal. She recently determined to use her savings to buy the doll herself, which my husband and I both admire. But with her birthday coming up and better uses for her savings later in life, we decided to buy it for her. I'm looking forward to seeing her face when she opens the package. Still, paying more than $100 for a doll seems like a classic example of conspicuous consumption, and I worry about what I'm teaching my child.

Will would disagree, but I consider us wealthy. True, we are careful with our money; I drive a 10 year old car we bought used, we are waiting to redo our back yard until we have enough in savings, and big purchases are carefully considered and budgeted. But we also are able to take every other summer in Vermont, and take the kids to Disneyworld on vacation. They get fairly elaborate birthday parties, and have all the modern conveniences. We certainly have far more than my family did when I was young.

When I was little we had everything we needed, but I didn't always have what I wanted. I don't regret my childhood; I learned a great work ethic and the value of the money I earned. But I also have memories of longing for what others had. In high school I couldn't afford the Express and Benetton clothing of my peers, except when I could find their cast offs in the thrift store. I bought my own car, but parking my turquoise Volvo -- older than I was -- next to the new Audis, Saabs, and Porsches in the school lot was an act of courage the first day. In middle school I wanted a new-fangled mountain bike. Most vividly, I remember how, much earlier, I too desired a doll.

In 1983 the only thing little girls could talk about were Cabbage Patch dolls. They were cute and soft and each one had its own story. I begged for one for Christmas. It was the only thing I asked for. To me it was a magic key of acceptance and friendship as well as a new toy to love. When the day came I could hardly wait to open my present. But instead of a Cabbage Patch baby of my own, I got Mandy. She was a lovely doll with clothes I could remove and a straw hat and glossy yellow hair. But she wasn't THE ONE. I played with her for years, but our games were always tinged with disappointment, as if they could have been better if only I had the right companion.

My children have everything they need, and a fair amount of what they want. I hope I'm making the line between the two clear. I try to create limits and teach them to appreciate what they have. I tell them "no" as much as I deem fair. They are required to do chores, and sometimes can earn money by doing odd jobs around the house. Both must use their own money to buy non-essentials. Miss Awesome makes many of her doll accessories from scrap fabric and tape. Still, I don't know how much of my parenting is an effort to give my kids the things I grieved for when I was little. Perhaps that's why I plunked down so much money on a silly doll.