I know I posted this piece earlier in the year,
but the story belongs in my holiday musings.
Enjoy.
I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills – oops, no that wasn’t me; that was Meryl Streep saying the first line from one of my favorite movies Out of Africa.
I meant to say once upon a time I had a plum tree in the far southwest corner of our back yard on Worsham Street in Montgomery. The first year we were there that plum tree rained plums like pecans off a pecan tree in San Saba, the pecan capital of Texas. For reinforcements to help with the harvest, I first asked my next-door neighbor Jon who brought a ladder to pick the ones higher than I could reach on a tree that was twenty feet tall. He also was the first to suggest we should make plum jelly, an idea I rejected as ludicrous because I didn’t cook anything anymore. Enter my cousin James Paul, my mother’s brother’s son, who lived nearby and volunteered to help make plum jelly because he had my Aunt Mildred’s recipe. Hm. He had a secret family recipe for plum jelly so maybe this was a sign I couldn’t ignore.
Okay, what’s next, I repeated to James who stood beside me in the kitchen but appeared lost in a trance for what seemed to me to be an inordinate amount of time. His eyes were closed so long I began to wonder if he’d drifted off to sleep. James, what’s next, I said louder with more than a bit of impatience.
Well Cuz, I think we need to put a bunch of these plums in some water and boil them for a while. That’s what we maybe need to do first, he finally said.
What? I asked. You think we maybe need to start by boiling some plums in water for a while? What kind of recipe is that?
Yeah, I seem to be having a little problem remembering the exact order Mother did things in, he replied. It’s been more than fifty years ago since I was a kid watching her, you know. I figured it would all come back to me, and I think it probably will. Besides, I thought you’d be more help. He stared at me – I stared back.
Then the lunacy of what we were doing hit us both, and we started laughing together. We were having a good time. It was fun to try to re-create a simpler period in our lives when our people made some of the food we ate in our home kitchens, to reconnect to the lost sense of that family we’d had in those earlier days since we basically were apart our entire adult lives except for an occasional Christmas when our paths crossed in random moments under one roof. We shared the same family roots that gave us joy in our early childhood days, the family that gave us our hopes and dreams for the future. For James and me on a Sunday afternoon in my Worsham Street kitchen in the third act of our lives making plum jelly was an act of faith.
But what we needed at the moment was a recipe.
James Paul called his older sister Charlotte who matter-of-factly reminded him their mother always used the recipe enclosed in the SureJell box. So much for secret family recipes, I thought. I could feel the wheels coming off my Colonel Sanders vision for a plum jelly empire. We opened one of the dozen SureJell boxes I bought the night before at the Brookshire Brothers grocery store and followed the directions that were indeed included with purchase. Charlotte was always the practical one and had a better memory than her brother and her cousin put together when it came to her mother’s cooking.
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Four hours later, eleven pints of plum jelly jars formed a line like red soldiers on the white kitchen counter. Each lid popped as it sealed to salute us for a job well done. James held a single jar to the light from the window over the kitchen sink and declared it to have the perfect clear plum color. We were happy cousins that afternoon and talked about how good the jelly would be on toast at breakfast. I wanted to taste the final product as soon as we finished, of course, but James told me it should set for a couple of days first. Naturally, he would remember that. We promised to call each other as soon as we took the first bite.
The taste of the jelly James and I made from plums on a tree in my own yard in 2010 defied description. I called him two days later after the jelly had time to set and asked him what he thought. Cuz, that jelly is about the best I ever had in my life, he said. I’ve eaten it on two pieces of toast this morning. It’s sweet, but still has a little perfect tart taste to it, too. And what did I tell you about the color? Prettiest reddish pink color I ever saw on jelly. I can’t believe we really did make it, can you? I had the most fun I’ve had in a long time. We’ve got a fig tree over here at our house in Navasota that’ll be producing before long. We ought to try making fig preserves, don’t you think?
Yes, that sounds good. I’ll have to bring your mother’s pots and pans back to you. Fig preserves should be a cinch for us now that we’re experts in the jelly business. I don’t know about you, but I think it’ll be tough for me to buy Smucker’s or Welch’s jelly again with any enthusiasm. Couldn’t agree more, he said. We just have to make what we have last through the winter. That could be a problem, I told him, and we both laughed.
I’m not sure if the taste improved with the intensity of the labor or the love James and I shared that Sunday afternoon in our hot Texas kitchen, but I know I ate peanut butter and plum jelly sandwiches for the rest of the summer. My neighbor Jon and I also had a great time together when we made his version of plum jelly from a cyberspace recipe he Googled which was much quicker to make than the SureJell one, or maybe I was just getting the hang of it… or maybe Jon did all the work.
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Slava Ukraini. For all the children everywhere.
I'll Call It Like I See It 