"Happiness is like jam. You can't spread it without getting some on yourself." - Anonymous
I make a lot of jam, pickles, relish and assorted goodies. In these summer weeks when fresh local produce is in abundant supply, my kitchen is often a hotbed of activity. Some days I swear I can hear my canning pot sighing from feeling overworked. I don't stop until my shelves are loaded to capacity and I am sure that everyone's favourites are on the shelves to be handed over on request or left on neighbourhood doorsteps or delivered to friends around the city.
Some things take longer than others. Jam is labour intensive as are my, often requested, bread and butter pickles, pickled beets and all my relishes. There are days my arms and shoulders ache and my legs and back scream for rest from long hours spent standing at the stove. Lately, I've been putting in only two or three canning hours at a time. My aging body can't sustain long hours at the stove anymore or the lifting of heavy pots.
By the end of this season, there will be a couple hundred jars on the shelves, all carefully labelled so as not to confuse the regular dill pickles from the hot dill pickles or the brandied peach jam from the plain peach jam. Visitors to my kitchen often comment that it looks like a store. A contractor who was here this morning to arrange some construction we are having done, even asked if he could buy some pickles. It made me laugh. I told him what I tell everyone, "help yourself to anything you want". My kitchen isn't a store. I make everything on the shelves to give away. There are, after all, only two people living in this house. We couldn't eat all those preserves in five years and many of those jars contain things we don't ever eat. I don't make them for us, I make them because they are what others want.
Recipients of these goodies often assume that I really enjoy canning but the truth is, I don't. There are days it can be satisfying or even to some extent soothing when I watch beautiful fruits turn into beautiful jams but there are lots of less rigorous activities that I can engage in to give me those same feelings. It's not the making of preserves that gives me joy. My joy is realized in giving people all those jars of pickles and relishes, jams and jellies. It is in knowing they will think of me when they are spreading their favourite rhubarb jam or grapefruit jelly on their toast in the morning or setting out a dish of beets or pickles on their dinner table. And while I know they could go to the grocery store and buy those same items for less money than it costs for me to make them, without hours of my labour, I also know those purchased preserves won't taste like mine. Heinz, Bicks or Smuckers might use essentially the same ingredients (though they add preservatives I never use), but they don't add the one thing that is in everything I make - the one thing that makes the difference between Smucker's jam and my jam, between Bick's pickles and my pickles between Heinz relish and my relish.
My jars aren't really jars of jam, pickles or relish. They are really jars of love.
