I put up 12 pints of black raspberry syrup today.
This announcement would have made my grandma swallow her chewing tobacco. "What'd you do the rest of the day?" she would have said. "File your toenails? Clean out your bellybutton? Eat bonbons?" I am not that old (really, I'm not) but in my memory bank there are pictures of my grandparents doing all kinds of things we think of today as strictly 19th century: slaughtering a hog, making their own sausage, plowing, planting, hoeing, harvesting and canning their own food, slopping the hogs. Summertime canning was a big deal, and it was still a big deal when I was growing up in a house next door to my grandparents' place, near Red Oak, Georgia. We always made plum jam, from the plums we picked off the tree in the side yard. I remember my mother in the kitchen, sweaty and disheveled, measuring out the sugar and skimming the foam off the top of the simmering fruit (everybody knows if you let that foam in, your jelly will be cloudy). Canning was then what motherhood is today: a competitive sport. Whoever made the clearest jelly won the prize, and you had to make it look like you did all that work in between plucking your eyebrows and catching up on the soaps ("Oh, that! Well, I wasn't busy Saturday, and...."). Using store-bought pectin was considered cheating. Pioneer women didn't have store-bought pectin, did they? All righty, then!
This is all stuff we're going to have to know soon, if you believe the Peak Oil people. These are the folks who say that the earth's supply of oil has already peaked and that soon--very, very soon; in the next five years or so--there will be a worldwide economic collapse, energy will be available only for the extremely wealthy and we will all go back to having to live on the land. Nobody can tell the future, of course, but predictions of the imminent collapse of civilization are nothing new. Still, oil is a finite resource, we depend on it for everything (this computer you're reading this on: made from oil, transported to your house by oil; the electricity that runs it probably derived from oil), and sooner or later, yes indeed, it will run out. (If you want to read up on this, I recommend the August issue of Harper's Magazine, and I would post the URL to the article itself except that it's not up on their website yet.) So maybe it is to my advantage that I had this agrarian childhood: when we are all tilling every square inch of arable land, I will be just a tad ahead of everybody else's learning curve.
But just a tad. As I worked today, little bits and pieces came back to me. My husband and the girls had gone off and picked the berries, so I found a recipe (online, natch) and washed the fruit, put it in big pots, measured the sugar, stuck in a little lemon peel, and started boiling. I went to the local hardware store, which hasn't been Home Depot-ed out of existence yet, and bought jars and lids. I was back home, ready to start squeezing the juice, when it dawned on me: no cheesecloth. At that moment, a fragment of memory surfaced: my mother's hands, carefully squeezing juice out of a steaming strip of old bedsheet. That I had. I tore it up into pieces, dumped the pulpy, steaming fruit in there, and started squeezing. I remembered how, as a child, I marveled at how my mother could stand to put her hands in something that had been boiling only a short while earlier; now here I was, doing the same thing. I could almost sense her nearby. "Don't squeeze too hard," her ghost was saying to me. "You don't want to get any pulp in there." Then I sterilized the jars and lids, and poured the syrup in.
When I was done, there they were: 12 perfect little jars of home-made black raspberry syrup. I have not felt such a sense of accomplishment since--well, I don't know when--and when I was done I sat down and the grief I felt for my mother was like an ache in my bones.