Scenes from Silver Creek: The Jam
Every summer the ladies of Silver Creek went into a frenzy
of jam making. I remember being
roped into the berry picking as a child.
Fat bushes of blackberry and delicate beds of strawberry. Apricots warm from the summer sun and
baskets of wormy apples. For weeks
every kitchen would be too hot to enter as the heat of the day competed with
the steam rising from ancient, vast stoves as to which was more uncomfortable.
My mother, sadly, made the worst jam in town and it was
always a disappointment to me to see such delicious fruit and know it would be
ruined by mom’s hammer touch. The
blackberry jam would have tiny bits of branches in it that you would find, all
unexpected, smeared on your January toast. The strawberry jam would be so sweet that it was almost
painful to eat. Tasteless apple
butter. I used to love to go to
the homes of my aunts and taste their wonderful jars of summer glory. Why? I would ask, did my mother and only my mother miss the
cooking gene in the family?
But every year she would tie on her sunshine yellow apron
and rope in the family to work.
The boys would haul cardboard boxes of empty jars from the basement and
then be free to be free. The
girls, unfortunately, were tied by antique gender roles into washing and
sterilizing jars, slicing fruit, and handing mom ingredients like surgical
nurses during a fruit appendectomy. When my sisters got married and moved out
it fell to me, the baby of the family, to do the work that three of us used to
share. And we did it, knowing full
well that all of this sweat would result in gleaming jars of crap.
Even my father, who worshipped my mother, wasn’t up to the
task of pretending her jam was anything other than awful. He even developed a “berry allergy”
that got him out of having to put the thin, purple substance that mom called
grape jelly onto his morning toast.
When all of us kids tried to claim we’d inherited the same allergy, she
refused to believe us. She took
me, as the smallest, and sat me on the chrome and red-leather step stool in the
kitchen and force fed me spoonfuls of grape jelly then watched me like a hawk
to see if I came out in a rash. I
didn’t and, to her mind, that made all of her kids immune from dad’s
affliction. To this day my brother
Ronnie blames me for not being a better actress. I tried to tell him that Katharine Hepburn couldn’t produce
hives on cue, but there is no reasoning with a man who was daily forced to eat
the much-feared cranberry-orange relish.
Each year at the Christmas boutique benefiting St. Edith’s,
housewives all over Silver Creek would proudly produce the fruits of their
summer labors for sale. Large
wicker baskets would be decorated with red and green ribbon or sprigs of fake
holly and filled with homemade goods. The tables of the church hall would groan
under the weight of golden loaves of pound cake and plates full of sugar-dusted
cookies. There was an unspoken
competition to be first through the door and then make a beeline for Mrs.
Hudson’s basket with glistening jars of strawberry jam, packets of sweet
macaroons, eye-wateringly dill pickles, and a little pottery crock of clover
honey.
Unfortunately for mom, her ineptitude in the kitchen was
well known and nobody ever wanted her basket. After one year when it was the last basket left, dad took to
making a great show of buying hers first “before anyone else could get their
hands on it.”