Scenes from Silver Creek: Summertime 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 beat him to it."