"Hot crumpets with jam and butter. What could be more ambrosial?" - William Boyd
The year I was ten, my Cousin Didi descended on us. She came
every other summer and stayed a couple of weeks. She was a perpetual student. This year she’d been taking cooking lessons
from a college. "Lok at me, I'm coo-king" she warble. She always smelled like lavender. She liked to crush lavender in her hands and
crumble it into her shoes and over her hair. She said it made her feel “one” with all that lived and breathed. She liked
to sit under the willow tree and count
the leaves. She was child of the air.
“ I won’t cook with anything that has eyes,” Didi said. She didn’t mind sausages though. “They don’t have eyes.” So we
had lots of sausages. But not with eggs, cause she thought eggs looked like they were eyes…..
One afternoon we walked down to the store to buy small canning
jars and peaches. We gushed over those peaches, juice ran down our hands. Didi liked to walk slowly, breathing in the air
and remarking on how “groovy” the world felt.
She hummed songs as we shuffled along. Her dark blonde hair
floated behind her like a web.
If we found flowers
growing over fences she’d pick
them, stuffing them behind her ears, and mine. Sometimes she brought a piece of
chalk and she’d draw a hopscotch on the sidewalk in front of fussy Mr. and Mrs. Bolt’s house. We were hopping up and down the sidewalk as they
came charging out with their old dog.
Didi had a way with people.
Calming. Soothing. She asked how the
universe was treating them. Pretty soon they all seemed happy as clams.
Some girls her age came along and she communed with them,
while we worked away. Then she sang us
songs while we picked blackberries. She observed that the day was “groovy”.
The day we came back from the store, my mother told us she had to go work half a day. She wanted us
to finish washing the blackberries. She planned on making preserves that night.
My mother told Didi to keep me out of trouble. Keep me busy. And
off she went to work. She’d be back at five.
Didi said we should
make the preserves. “It will be groovy,”
she chirped. I’d never made jam. Didi
said they learned how to make “Sun jam”
in her last cooking class.
She got the white plastic wash basin from the kitchen, put it
on the grass and piled in a ton of fruit. Then she got the oven roaster, and filled
it as well.
She slipped off her socks and shoes. Lavender fell out of her
socks. We rinsed off our feet with the hose. Didi
stepped into the roasting pan. I stepped into the white kitchen basin. We giggled.
We stomped and slushed and slipped in blackberries till our feet were purple. It
was fun. It was silly. Didi danced out
of the roasting pan . We rinsed off our feet with the garden hose. We put socks back on, over our purple stained feet.
Didi ladled soggy
blackberries into small jars. We set the
24 jars out in the bright sun. Then we plopped ourselves under the willow tree to
listen to the lids pop. “Groovy”, intoned Didi as she became as one with the earth.
My mother came home to find the little jars sitting nicely on
the table. She was thrilled. Didi was thrilled.
I think I was thrilled. I wasn’t sure. My
feet were itchy from all the purple goo.
My mother was tickled
pink. She had us deliver jars to all of the neighbours. Kept quite a few for
ourselves. Opened one jar that night to
ladle over ice cream.
Even the Bolts got a couple of jars. They thought it was the
best jam they had ever tasted. Wanted to know what the secret ingredient was. There
seemed to be a hint of lavender……
By that time, it was
the end of the week, and Didi left to return to cooking school. “But nothing
with eyes. I don’t do eyes. ” She had a “groovy”
time with us.
Making jam had made her
feel “one” with her universe…..
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