Last week of school. Finals and yearbooks. Stifling
classrooms. Halls littered with pencil stubs, loose-leaf paper piles, and goodbyes.
Outside, summer
looms; a promise of lazy mornings, picnics and pools, novels devoured long past
bedtime, swarms of friends - and fireflies - Capturing the Flag.
And Strawberry Jam.
Long before Black Friday ever dreamed of piggybacking on
Thanksgiving, Strawberry Picking Day chased the Last Day of School.
Beneath a blazing sun - or a sky rimmed with thunderheads
– mom, siblings, and I would trek far out into the strawberry fields, step-skipping
over vines and hoses to the rows where red outshone green and brown.
Strawberries. Sun-kissed sweet and juicy. One mouth-watering berry after another. Not to be denied.
Decision after decision. Deposit this ruby ripe beauty into
the faded green quart beside my knee, or yank the stem and pop it into my mouth?
Fact: Sunshine
tastes like a warm, ripe strawberry gently pulled off a vine, suckled and
swallowed.
Fact: Brewing strawberry jam is the process by which we spread
that sumptuousness and sunshine across seasons.
Across generations.
From mother to daughters and sons.
Empty glass jars line countertops. Bowls overloaded with fruit and discarded
stems vie for space on the table. Kettles
filled with water, lids, and crushed berry-sugar-pectin puree simmer on the
stovetop. The air tastes/smells/feels sticky sweet.
World, go away. Can’t you see that we are on a mission?
Capturing a harvest. Preserving a peak. Preparing perfection from precision.
Hours after we have reached for the first berry in the field,
steaming preserves are ladled into jars - lidded, capped, boiled.
Treasured.
The Jam and the Jamming. A transcendent tradition.
We pick and chat, peel and recollect, mash and gossip,
stir and sing.
Mom and me. For
decades.
Grammy, the kids and me -for all the precious years of their young lives.
Saturday morning will soon arrive. Younger Daughter will don cap and gown, walk
across a stage and off to her future.
Last night, on the eve of The Last Day of School, Daughter gifted me.
Watching her grandmother balance hot jars of
strawberry jam as she walked slowly toward her car in the darkness, Daughter
reached for my hand and exclaimed, “I love the way the house smells when we
make jam!”
“Me, too,” I agreed.
“Promise, Mama,” she urged, “promise that when I have
kids you’ll come to my house to pick strawberries and make jam. I’ll do all the stuff that you do to make the
jam, and you can do what Grammi does. Together, we can teach my kids how to capture summer.”
Long ago, my amazing mom taught me how to capture summer.
Color me ecstatic if my kids – and their kids - make
certain that Strawberry Picking Day chases the Last Day of School - for
generations to come.
QUING Hereby Decrees:
Memories can fade like berry stains
on fingertips. Best to make them, again and again.
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