For weeks now, Hillary has been talking about making beach plum jelly and, in response, I've been rolling my eyes. My thinking is this: I don't have time for it. It's too much trouble. The recipe calls for way too much sugar. It's far easier to buy a jar at The Chatham Jam and Jelly Shop.
Then yesterday he came home with two pails of picked beach plums. Before I knew it I was preparing plum juice and sterilizing jars and the house was filled with the sweet-smelling steam. For me, scent is the most evocative sense, capable of eliciting the most long-forgotten memories. Suddenly I was thrown back to my early days as a bride when each fall my mother-in-law would take me to the spots she knew the bushes grew. We'd head out to Long Pond to harvest the purple fruit while she told me the secrets for making the sweet-tart jelly. ("Always throw in some green berries for their high pectin quality.")
And then I was remembering my childhood on the farm and the production line in our kitchen as my mother put up preserves and canned enough fruits and vegetables to see us through the winter. I was twelve - the farm sold to a developer - before supermarket cans appeared on our kitchen shelves.
I find great satisfaction in seeing the jeweled-filled jars on the counter and in returning to a fall ritual that slows me down and connects me to the earth. And links me, too, to the generation of women who practiced it before me.
What I wonder is what rituals are we handing down to our chuildren today.