Gram had a raspberry bush outside of the old, red, barn-like
garage where my Grandpa kept his tools.
The bush was prickly with small thorns that scratched skin or grabbed
clothing. When we were small, my
brothers and cousins and I would hide in it like rabbits. Sometimes we picked handfuls of berries to
sustain ourselves on those days when we would run away and build hideouts in
the back field. The bush was voracious
and even sent small shoots through the thick walls of the garage and through
cement cracks in the floor. And the best
part about this old bush was the fact that Gram makes the best raspberry jam in
the world from its fruit.
In my very early twenties, when I was beginning to explore
the idea of spirit and the nature of the universe with that idealistic vision
that one has in their very early twenties, I had a dream. In the dream I came to a house or an
apartment where a goddess lived. She was
tall and beautiful with long dark hair.
She wore no clothes, she needed none, she was luminous in her own
light. Plants grew in pots hanging from
ceilings or along the hardwood floors.
Large wooden bookshelves held libraries of secret tomes that contained
the innermost knowledge of the universe.
She invited me inside, and walked me past her bathroom where an Aries
man showered and took me to a chair. She
told me she had a gift for me, something that would help me along my life
journey. She rummaged around and pulled
out a dusty little wooden box. When I
opened it, I saw that it was full of tiny black grains. With the wisdom that comes with dreaming, I
knew these were blackberry seeds and that they were my gift. These would help me and guide me along my
journey.
When I woke from the dream, I had to question every
detail. At that time, I had no
experience with blackberries, and I wondered if I had meant to dream of Gram’s
raspberries. But no, the dream was what
it was: they were blackberries.
A year or so later, I moved west of the Cascade Mountains,
and I met my Joseph, my Aries man. He
and I were hardcore hikers for a while and when we were exploring the back
trails of our favorite hiking spot, we found a great sprawling bunch of
blackberry bushes. We picked a bunch and
I made us a blackberry pie. But we also
decided that we needed to pick some more and try to make the blackberry wine
that our friend, Carrie, encouraged us to try.
That was the first batch of many blackberry wines to come. And when we moved into our current home, it
was hardly surprising that most of the acres were covered with a twisted mess
of blackberry vines.
Unlike raspberries, Blackberry Vines don’t just scratch,
they murder. Their thorns grow thick as
fingernails and reach into clothing and boots.
They invite you in with their dark, juicy berries. You slide easily into their folds. But as soon as you try to turn or move away
from their centers, they have you, they hold you, the scratch you, they claw
you. But as this new place was going to
be our little farmstead, and I was training to be a proper farmwife, I thought
it was high time I learned to can and to make use of these sinister
fruits. Like knitting and cooking, this
new aspect of wifely industry soon turned into a passion, and it wasn’t long
before I was making jams and jellies from all the fruit growing on our new
spread. But blackberries were the
first.
My first batch, unfortunately, I burnt. Joseph bought me a book: Blue Ribbon Preserves by Linda J. Amendt. (I highly recommend the recipe Amendt gives
for zucchini pickles.) And Joseph bought
the Ball Blue Book of Preserving. Ball, that mason jar company, gave a
recipe for making jam without pectin.
You just had to cook down the sugar and fruit until it jelled on its
own. Well, I soon found I didn’t have a
feeling for it when that first batch had an undercurrent of charcoal. I was
speaking to Gram about this on the phone, all those years ago, and she gave me
the best jam-making advice I’ve ever received.
She said to “just use the recipe on the box [of pectin].” That’s when I found out that Gram’s raspberry
jam wasn’t a secret she dug out of an old, leather-bound book of Grandmotherly
secrets, but a real, easy, working recipe from a box of pectin. And why not?
Farmwives know the value of easy.
Ever since that day I have used the recipe from the Ball box of Pectin,
and my family loves my jams. I would say
that my blackberries are to me what Gram’s raspberries are to her: a medium for
creating delicious art that comes out of the boiling-water canner looking likes
jewels of garnet, amber, and rubies.
Blackberry is my signature jam.
(Joseph, however, disagrees with this.
He hates all the seeds in the jam, and prefers my apple and blackberry
jelly. Well, why not? One can’t make the same preserve every
time!)
So I spent my morning this morning canning, and musing on my
long history with blackberries.
Christmas is right around the corner, and homemade preserves make the
best gifts!
