4.29.2003
-Jam today!-
We had six Victoria plum trees in our garden in Norbiton. They grew in a row at the very edge of the lawn, shadowing the patio area and making mowing the lawn 'a God-damn nightmare' for my father. They were big trees - as a six year old standing underneath them, I never felt the requisite urge to climb them - with slender sleek branches raised to the sky and gleaming green leaves. My father had to lift me up to show me their pretty flowers which grew in clusters on their boughs.
On a scorching-hot, blue-sky, ice cream-eating summer day my mother decided it was time to relieve the trees of their heavy, ripe fruit - wasps were gathering around them in a way that did not bode well for a mother who had two small children playing outside.
"We're going to make plum jam,"
she announced, and made my sister and me pick the ones that had fallen to the ground so that we would stay out of her way while she picked the decent ones from the boughs. When she had finally gathered enough to start making the jam, we were already bored of the process of making it, but we still wanted the jam. So we ran in and out of the garden and kitchen in between games in the tall grass of the garden - my father mowed the lawn whenever he could be bothered to do it, which was not very often - to see how the jam was progressing.
It seemed like my mother was boiling the contents of the entire kitchen - the sugary air was sweet with the fragrance of the boiling plums. I counted the glass jars on the kitchen counter.
"We're going to make five jars of the jam?"
I asked my mother. She nodded, her curly hair wet with sweat from the heat. I was impressed - normally my mother was strict with sugary foods. I had images of finishing all the jam in one go.
One time I went in and saw she was boiling the jars.
"Why are you boiling the jars?"
I asked.
"It's to sterilise them."
She said, as if that explained everything. I said,
"Oh," then "really" and then "why?"
She looked up from stirring the plum mixture then said,
"It makes them clean."
"Oh," I said again, then went out to play with my sister.
It was dinner time when the jam making was finished so we weren't allowed to have the jam that night, but I was allowed one spoonful of it to taste. It was not as sweet as I thought it would be, but the texture of the fruit made me want more of it. But I was six. My sister was five. The five jars of jam soon lost their charms on me and my sister, and my mother had to resort to coaxing and bribery - for example, by putting it on my favourite dessert, rice pudding - to make us finish it all.