This piece was originally published in Quarto’s 2022 Spring Print.
Illustration by Mel Wang
Turn down the AC, open the windows. Check the pantry’s top and bottom shelves for jars, the drawers for tongs and funnels. In the shadowy drawer-back, curved red rubber. Behind the paper towels and Lysol, diamond-faceted jars without lids. A liter Ball jar filled with rings, no lids. The lids can’t be reused. Maybe I missed a stash in the drawer. But no, she would’ve put it with the rings. They’re not in the same jar — no not at the bottom either. Is there a box, or crate, that the jars came in? It would be green, with deflated shrink-wrap.
Maybe it’s in the garage. Somewhere behind or between boxes of dried-out markers and newspaper-veined piñatas, tree-trimming shears, drill bit sets, raisiny vacuum bags. I consider it a failure when, sweaty for the wrong reasons, I buy 50 lids on Amazon. I go inside and turn the AC down, but I leave the windows open, humidity ebbing in.
At the farmer’s market, I guess how many more peaches will make five pounds as each drops into the bag. I’m thinking of this as I press an overripe peach and the skin skids off under my thumb, leaving it printed with bruise-yellow juice. Do I put the peach back or in the bag? I drop it in, deciding that this must be five pounds. It’s 4.5 on the fruit-stall scale. 4.5 pounds is enough for four 8 oz. jars. Once the jars on the pantry floor lined the counters and hung in a shoe-rack on the door, hundreds in the kitchen in strange places, dozens in the coat closet, winter-ready on the shelf above the rack, but this year there will be four tiny jars.
The wounded peach oozes on the others on the way home. I touch its juice on every fruit as I twist their halves to reach the pit and dice each ruby-and-topaz dome. I always liked unpeeled fruits for jam, that the skin never disappeared into the spread. We had plum jelly like pink lucite, eaten with cheese on crackers, and strawberry jam full of dainty seeds and raspberry jam with seeds like boulders that lodged in back molars, canned tomatoes peeled and organlike and labeled with the date, smooth, spiced apple butter in little 4 oz. jars to give as gifts with blank To:/From: stickers ready on top, pale bread-and-butter pickles floating among coriander seeds like whales among fish, sliced jalapeños to top February nachos and slim green beans for March dinners in the same shade of damp green, nectarines that broke down into a sparkling golden jam. But I wanted fruits with skin — figs, cherries, pickled grape tomatoes, my peaches with their prickle-dewed skins left on. She knew this, and though she would have preserved them anyway, she did so then for me.
See, now, how the sugar softens each yellow cube, but the skin doesn’t seem to even know? And I realize that I don’t know whether to boil the water for the jars now, or once the fruit’s in the pot, or once it’s begun to simmer — they’re supposed to be warm for the hot jam, but what is warm, and how fast does glass cool, and how long does a batch of fruit this small take to thicken?
I fill the medium stock pot with water and set it on the back right burner, my phone timer preemptively set for 15 minutes, which I think is the right amount of time for sterilization. The fruit goes in the pot with its thin, grainy proto-syrup. Soon, tiny bubbles ascend the sides. There are still no bubbles in the stockpot, though, and I turn the back burner from 6 to HI. The gas-flame hisses. I remember now why canning-time was the only time we ever saw her shoulders (she didn’t like her arms). She wore a tank top and shorts, uncaring of the splatters that sometimes scarred, while we sat next to the AC unit in swimsuits licking sticky spoons or took turns milling tomatoes on the porch.
When the water starts to boil, I place the tongs on each jar with two hands and lower them into the pot with one. I draw back, expecting splashes or shatters, and am pleased that they only rattle. It’s a rattle I’ve forgotten to remember. I try to think of the last time I heard it, but it was hard to mark the lasts. I’m still eating jars of her pickles and preserves, bringing out one jar at a time from the third shelf of the pantry and cracking the lid like it’s her very body, broken for me. Which it is, was. Not just broken up by splatter-stains and such, but broken down in the way you might break down a dresser or cabinet to oil the hinges and drawer-tracks, to re-sand and re-stain, to rebuild.
She preserved what she grew, refurbished our furniture in a rotating cycle, cut up the quilts on the beds without warning to fashion them into new ones. Eventually the patterns became erratic and the stitches wobbly, the marigolds planted next to the beans instead of the tomatoes, but the improvements never stopped. Today, stacks of quilting squares sit in a plastic bin at the bottom of the big bedroom closet, unspackled holes dot the walls like the remnants of a woodpecker’s manic rampage, and squirrels hang from the birdfeeder looking forlornly at the garden once full of easy pickings.
The sound of the house as it was has lulled me into letting the jam slip out of its simmer. I know before I reach for the wooden spoon that the bottom of the pot is crusted with burnt sugar. Turn down the heat, pull a cutting board from the thin lower cabinet, grab lemons from the fridge and the measuring cup from up above, cut, squeeze, get the sieve, strain the juice into the jam. The timer goes off, and, as the acid sets the peaches’ pectin, I turn off the back burner. How do I pour the water out of the jars? Should I have boiled them upside down? I clamp the tongs on the first jar and, gripping the handles with a fearful strength, angle my elbow downward so most of the hot water can stream out. In between jars, stir the thickened jam, heat on 2, spoon skidding across the shouldn’t-be-bumpy bottom of the pot.
When the jars are lined up on the counter and the jam is thick and done, shallow spoonfuls of amber slip down the funnel’s bowl. After filling each jar to the top, or as near as won’t let any jam suck out with the air, there’s just enough left for another 4 oz. jar. I look toward the pantry, where dozens of them wait in a wide box, then back to the water reboiling on the stove. I pick up the tongs and slowly drop each jar into the water. Even if I did everything right, the jars still might not seal. The jars could last for months or only two weeks in the fridge, their lids unindented, their jam spread on toast with lunch and dinner, stirred into oatmeal every morning, spooned into thumbprinted shortbread.
I take a new jar from the box in the pantry and place the sticky-filmed funnel on top. Choose a spoon from the drawer. Stand against the closed pantry door, and, as I eat a spoonful of peaches turned inside-out and flecked with scrapes of sugar-fond, turn the jar in my palm. The pre-filled From: ______ line of a frayed and stubborn sticker tells me what I don’t need to remember.
Ellie Windsor is a senior in Columbia College studying Creative Writing and Math. She is from Austin, Texas, and lives with her cat, Loretta.