It's Jelly Season: A story about being rooted in family by Jen Flexer

It’s the time of year when I open the big freezer and take out some of whatever has been best this past summer…crabapples, peaches, sour cherries, grape juice, black raspberries. If we’re lucky, strawberries ripe from the field. If we’re less lucky (or a little desperate), the strawberries might come from a bag. The best part is working with my husband or my daughter, where one of us fills the jars, and another wipes the threads and tightens the lids.

Canning is a two-person job. You can do it alone, but it doesn’t work as well.

Jelly season is also a time when I feel deeply connected to my family who’s come before. My grandma, and my mom, and my dad, who taught me to can and to make jam, and who told me stories about…

Picking wild horseradish during the Great Depression, and grinding it, while trying to hold back the tears and the snot caused by the fumes

Bringing in basketfuls of gooseberries, and currents, and other fruits I’ve never tasted

Milking the cows, and playing euchre by firelight in the long, long, snowy winters of western New York

Those are my roots.

But jelly season is also about the future. It’s about taking summer’s most fleeting moments, when the fruit is ripe, and sweet, and bursting with juice — and hurling those flashes of light forward, into winter, where they can serve as a reminder that the dark times won’t last forever, and that brighter, sweeter times still lie ahead.

There’s something mysterious to me, about jelly-making…when it’s good, it’s the fruit that stars. Everything else that has to be done…the cleaning, peeling, cooking…serves no more purpose than to call attention to the beauty that was already there, to begin with.

And making jam is a gift, as well. It’s something to be shared with neighbors, and with distant cousins and friends. It’s a connection across time and distance. It connects us. With every PBJ or slice of toast, those people know how much they’re loved. And that love carries forward, through Jen, from Irene, and Delia, and Janet, and Linda, and Tom.

It’s also the connection I have with my daughter, who knows how to make jam, and still would rather eat a PBJ with jam from our own black raspberries. And when her family grows and changes, I know she’ll carry that story forward, through time and space, as well.

I don’t really know much about religion. But the taste of jam, teaches me about God.