My cousin James Paul texted me the ingredients we needed for our Sunday afternoon plum jelly project, and I was not surprised to discover the only item for the jelly I had in our Worsham Street kitchen was the plums piled high on the counters which meant the Saturday night before we planned to make the plum jelly I made a trip to the regional Brookshire Brothers grocery store that anchored a small shopping center five minutes from our home. I worried I might not be able to find what we needed at the store but was surprised to come upon an entire section of an aisle at Brookshire Brothers that was devoted to canning and preserving. I had forgotten I lived in rural Texas where the homemade goodies sold in downtown Montgomery on the first Saturday of every month regularly included jellies, jams and preserves. Brookshire Brothers knew their market.
Everything including the two cartons of twelve each one pint sparkling clear new Mason jars (now called Ball jars) was conveniently located in one place. It was as if the grocery store stockers knew my Aunt Mildred’s recipe verbatim, or did everyone make jelly with the same three ingredients…hm…I wondered how I had managed to live sixty-four years without attempting to make any kind of jelly. Just not my jam, I smiled to myself.
The one exception the Brookshire Brothers aisle lacked was cheese cloth. Apparently no one knew cheese cloth was a necessity except my Aunt Mildred. After searching the entire store twice I resorted to asking the Customer Service woman behind the lottery tickets who not only recognized what cheese cloth was but also left her booth to show me where it was, and I was done. Since time was money and money was money, I made a mental note at checkout to keep a tally of the cost for our homemade plum jelly in case I decided to sell a homemade goody at the July first Saturday event. I had leapfrogged in my mind from making twenty-four jars of jelly to becoming a jelly entrepreneur. Keep cranking out the fruit, O Ye Plum Tree of Plenty.
True to his word James brought several of his mother’s ancient gigantic aluminum pots and pans to my house the next day. A large wooden mortar and pestle paired with a tall cylindrical-shaped strainer added a dose of authenticity to our cooking implements the following Sunday afternoon. We laid everything out on my kitchen counter next to the mounds of plums in the baskets. James and I stared at the counters and then looked at each other.
James Paul, as I knew him when we were children, was a handsome man in his mid-fifties. He wasn’t tall—less than six feet—and weighed maybe 135 pounds if he weighed after breakfast. He was a GQ male model size and an equally GQ sexy looking man. His salt-and-pepper short hair was more salt than pepper those days and matched the color of his thick mustache and small goatee. He cut the signature hair he wore during fifteen years of playing bass guitar and singing professionally with bands in honky-tonks, bars, juke joints and community halls around central Texas, he said, because the longer length got to be too much trouble. According to him the only time long hair was worth the effort was when he walked into a bar to make a statement, when he needed the “look.” Now he needed to make a different statement.
Okay, I said. What’s next? He smiled that slow smile of his and struck a thoughtful pose. He stood quietly, looked around the kitchen, folded his arms, shifted his weight, and finally closed his eyes while I waited and wondered what in the world was going on with him. I assumed he needed a moment to collect his thoughts, but this was getting to be ridiculous. He slowly shook his head. I had a nagging suspicion my plum jelly enterprise was collapsing before it got off the kitchen floor.
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Please stay tuned for Part 3, the final episode of The Case of the Prolific Plum Tree.
I'll Call It Like I See It 