AKA, Apricot Jam
Yep, that’s what I did Sunday. Four batches. The kind made from a box of apricots that’re just at the point of melting into mush in the bottom of the crate. The kind where you smell them and you say, “ahhhh” and you breathe way out and you put your head down in the box and you breathe way in and you think, “Clearly there is a goddess in charge of all this and she loves me,” and you breathe out and then breathe waaaaayyyyyy in and hold it until your head spins and then breathe out and bury your head in the box and do it again and again while believing for a minute that all is right in the world.
And then you turn on the stove and sterilize the jars and pit the apricots and add a splash of good lemon juice and pectin and sugar and nothing else and put two pots on the stove and make them both at the same time. Sweat dripping down the small of your back and off the tip of your nose while you stir with both hands. Hot jam. Hot kitchen. The smell of cooking apricots and sugar. Jars filled and inverted. Hundreds years of tradition embodied in the liquid sunshine preserved on the counter for the joy of giving. For the joy of opening a jar of summer in the middle of next winter. Riches beyond compare.
And then. And then there was just enough apricot puree left over for a blender full of fresh apricot daiquiris to wash away the sore back and summer-kitchen heat and the tiredness. I know there is a goddess in charge and she loves me. I have 20 jars of her love and a rum hangover to prove it.
I’ve always felt that if only Georgia O’keefe had lived in California instead of New Mexico, we’d all have a greater appreciation for the feminine in apricots, peaches and nectarines. And perhaps not have been subjected to all those slightly macabre, dry, bleached cow skulls.