Jam is My Jam

My last post was about raspberries, the ones I grew this season. What happens to all of them, you ask? Each year, I control my urge to eat them immediately and instead, store them until fall when I turn them into jam. Delicious jam. Raspberries and sugar, that's it. As they ripen, I freeze them in batches. Then in November after the growing season is done, I thaw them and cook.  My method is to keep them in the fridge for a few days, and they condense into an intensely fragrant, ruby-colored bowl of fruit. I mash it, boil it, then cook with an almost equal amount of warmed sugar. (Yes, really. That's a thing. You warm the sugar at 200 degrees for about twenty minutes and it dissolves quicker.) I test it to be sure it will gel and then do a hot water bath and can it all in hot jars. Voila!

I perfected this method a few years ago, when I realized that I was growing enough raspberries to do something. It came as a surprise to me. I wanted to be able to do these things -- grow berries, cook jam, and put up jars -- but I was still amazed when I realized that the spot where I had planted raspberry canes -- tiny sticks with thorns on them, looking mostly like a pile of kindling -- actually *produced*. If you aren't a gardener, then you might wonder why I was doubting the process.  The answer is that planting anything, whether it's seeds, seedlings, canes, bulbs or any of the ways that our flora kin reproduce isn't a guarantee. It's a gamble; it's a risk. Like life, of course.

The year after my mother died, I took care of her garden as best I could, considering that it was in New Hampshire and I was in Massachusetts. Two of her aspirational garden projects were pumpkins and raspberries. I say aspirational because they were fruits that she wanted to conquer. She wanted to grow huge pumpkins and she loved raspberries. Some years, she'd get pumpkins that were astonishing. The raspberries, though, were another story. They never flourished and she never got more than a handful of raspberries. I understand now why they didn't, though in my thirties, before I became a home owner, I hadn't gardened enough to understand the nature of planting too close to trees.

When I put the raspberries in my yard a decade ago, I did it, honestly, because I wanted to see if I could. To see what would happen, but mostly? Because it broke my heart that in her time, my mother hadn't succeeded. That's my interpretation, of course, but when you are 39 and your mother is dying of cancer -- lungs, throat, brain and things get excruciating quickly -- these are things you fixate on.

That was the original impetus: sad, broken, feeling unfinished. An echo of things not said? Probably.

But those ugly, prickly sticks soon had tiny green flags unfurling which became leaves. They liked the spot I'd given them and stretched up and out, into the sun. I mulched them and talked to them and told them I wanted them to stick with me. By the third year, miraculous little red gems appeared. I had my raspberry patch.

But then, over time, something shifted. I realized something wonderful: I loved raspberries. On my own, I loved them. It was a realization, too, that my mother and I shared this thing. And that bit of insight was a delight.

So below are pictures of my process. I am grateful for my mother's legacy -- both the good and the bad. As I write this, it is two days before Thanksgiving, so I am particularly aware of the lineage of food and family.

Your encore for today? Find gratitude wherever you can.

That's all and that's enough. It's good for the soul.