Whole Life Times: Season’s End

September 2006 | Thought for Food

Season’s End

By Rebecca Clarren

In the back of my fridge, behind an often forgotten jar of mayonnaise and some old yogurt, there’s a pint jar of homemade crabapple jam with an inch of bright red left at the bottom. It’s been there for months now, even though it’s delicious: equal parts sweet and tart with a firm texture, just right against peanut butter. A Christmas gift from my friend Hil, the jam must have been made last year at this time, back when her cancer was still in remission.

Today, I pull out the jar and leave it on the counter to consider. Canning season has fallen upon me again with the pressured pulse to grab all the freshness of summer before it’s too late and the bounty rots to soil. Before we are left with no choice but to buy the grocery store’s tired vegetables that have made long journeys from the south. With these dwindling days of the garden, I shove aside my work and gather beets. I’m short on wide-mouth jars and decide to empty Hil’s jam for reuse. I open a window to let in the late September bite and afternoon light seeps through the nearly empty jar, casting a crescent of ruby shadow across the white countertop.

While I boil beets and mix the pickling mixture of sugar, vinegar, whole cloves and wrinkled red peppers, my mind skips between memories that intersect like string in a game of cat’s cradle.

It is years before and my then boyfriend is teaching me to can in his cramped kitchen that overlooks an apple orchard. He, a perfectionist in all things, shakes his head at my sloppy attention to detail as I ladle and spill apple butter into jars. He is poor and my college degree, newspaper job and married parents cast a wide chasm between us. We had planted a garden together that previous summer, full of hope, potatoes, garlic and eggplant. By July, while camping in a sagging tent, we broke-up. Still, for months after, we continued to spend time pulling weeds, picking fruit, canning. When we sealed the last jar of applesauce, I drove away down his dirt road filled with bittersweet relief.

I remember the basement of my childhood in Seattle. It was a dank place where Walla Walla onions hung in old panty hose from the rafters above jars and jars of homemade pickles. My Mom bundled us kids out to the soggy northwest countryside to scoop cucumbers from roadside stands. Back home, we washed the cucumbers in the washing machine—no soap, gentle cycle (a family secret!)—before stuffing the jars, the faint smell of dill lingering on our skin.

And then it is someone else’s memory, passed down to me on long car rides. Stories of how my great-grandmother buried cabbage directly into the hard ground of her South Dakota ranch to make sauerkraut in the tradition she carried with her all the way from Lithuania. How there were weeks when the big tin pot she used to can would sit on the stove in the sod house kitchen. How the smell of jam would rush across the plains past hundreds of skinny cows.

Today, as I slip the skins off beets under the rush of cool tap water, my eye catches the nearly empty jam jar, still sitting on the counter. I think about Hil, about her death this past summer. About why I can’t seem to finish up this jam. She was my parents’ oldest friend. I know how she lost her fingertips while mowing our lawn. I know that she was a nurse, that she had a divorce and that her three daughters, younger than I, have her easy laughter and tall strong frame. When my mother was pregnant with me, Hil knew before my grandparents.

And I realize, almost with guilt, that what is mostly hard is that my memories of Hil tie themselves to images of my much younger parents. Before they had grey hair and were so cynical about peace; before I knew something about the ways they and life would disappoint. Without Hil, that time recedes. Memory will not make it real. Instead, I have this little bit of jam, which she made in the last year of her life.

For now, I put Hil’s jar back behind the mayonnaise and the leftovers. I can’t bring myself to finish it.

Rebecca Clarren writes and cans jam and vegetables at her home in Portland, Ore. An investigative journalist, her work also appears in Salon.com, The Nation, Orion and Ms.

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