Sunday in late August, I go to meditation, then home to can strawberry jam. Today the temperature is 94 and the humidity is high.
I hurry through the mixing, boiling, filling and clean-up with sweat covering me like other farm wives in hot kitchens putting by the food for the winter throughout time.
It is odd in this time, 2017, to know that I could buy a jar of strawberry jam for about 3 or 4 dollars. It certainly took more than that to make my 5 jars. It took my friend Deanna 18 months of planting and tending her small organic strawberry field. Next came the summer day in June we picked, and I took the berries home and carefully froze them for future use. Then it took procuring and cleaning jars and lids, having pectin and cane sugar, and turning up the burners on a hot day.
The jam is the color of a deep red ruby. The sugar is about 1/3 of what would be in the 3 dollar jar, and it is cane sugar, not beet sugar. Beet sugar is grown with many herbicides and pesticides. So - for my efforts I get a sweet taste of summer in a jar that is mostly fruit and not laden with toxins.
What is this 6 oz jar worth? There is no comparison, there is no way to determine worth. Everyone chooses what they feel is a priority and allocates time accordingly.
Sweaty as I write, I think of my great grand mother in North Dakota living in a sod house. In summer she must have cooked in her hot little kitchen, or out in the hot air. She was expected to make a pie every day for her husband. She must have canned every thing she could, because that is what farmers did. She had 6 children to help her as they got older, but she was worn out early. She died at 59.
Our ancestral mothers worked so hard, and under circumstances we can barely imagine. They did not have a store full of cheap food to access at will. They sewed the children's clothes, grew the summer garden, put food on the table every day and probably rarely had a holiday. I wonder if my great grandmother ever went to a restaurant.
I have a photo of her on my alter, her beautiful, tired face. Her mouth just barely hinting at a smile. My grandmother resembles her, and I would like to think I resemble them both, and that my grand daughters shape of face can be traced back to them.
In winter when the air is damp and cold, summer only a memory, I will open a jar of ruby red jam and spread it on toast for my grand daughters. They will eat it like candy and we will talk about my friend and the mountain field where the berries were grown. We will savor the pleasure of a special food, lovingly grown and put by. In this I carry the past into the present, I bring my grandmothers into my my grand parenting, enriching my soul, preparing for my own life to be only a history.
