In a jam
Something terrible happened this summer – Alan, our neighbourhood preserver, suffered a crippling crisis of confidence.
People give Alan their spare produce – quinces, oranges, lemons, limes, red and green tomatoes which he transforms into ramekins of dense paste, jars of sweet dark marmalade and tangy chutneys and sandwhich pickles.
It all started years ago with Alan’s prolific apricot tree. He tried his hand at making jam from the surplus fruit and it turns out he’s good at it.
He leaves jars on neighbour’s doorsteps or slips them into hands at the dog park.
The other preserves follow, the only thing he takes in exchange are empty jars.
When Alan and his wife, Marge, give their daughter and her family their house and build a granny flat in the backyard, the apricot tree has to make way.
The urge to make jam however is still strong. Just before Christmas Alan asks me to pick up a box of ripe apricots from the wholesale market.
I find one and deliver it to him through his back gate, expecting a jar of his beautifully dark jam to follow shortly after.
Alan has a talent for cooking a jam almost to the edge of burning so it has this beautful almost bittersweet taste.
The next morning instead of a jar there’s a text, “First batch disaster, burnt pot and jam.”
Shit. I imagine the smell as Alan scrapes the burnt fruit into the compost bin and then the endless scrubbing and soaking to get the blackened toffee off the bottom of the pot.
A few hours later another text – “Second batch burnt, pot burnt. That’s it, no more. I used to make apricot jam.”
The hopeless resignation in his words shocks me.
I’d seen Alan face challenges over the years; the Croatian tomato crop failure, the window cut in the hedge debacle, even his multi-year struggle with a tricky cointreau marmalade recipe had never dimmed his optimism.
This feels different – somehow final.
When I ask him what happened he seems at a loss and says he doesn’t know. He explains his favourite old jam-making pot didn’t work on the new induction stove so he had to use a new pot.
I suggest a diffuser between the old pot and the induction stove, but he looks down and lets on that he’d gotten rid of it when they moved into the granny flat.
I don’t know what to say, so I let him be.
I worry; Alan’s preserving process is more than just jars of jam, it’s like a social glue that makes us feel part of a whole.
It dawns on me that our collective well-being depends on Alan’s mastery of induction cooking and the only way that’s going to happen is getting him back on the jam-making horse.
A couple of weeks pass and this afternoon while we’re down in Fish Creek walking around our friends’ orchard I notice their plum trees are so fully laden with fruit that the branches are laying on the ground.
Take some they say, please, as many as you like.
I take a picture of the fruit, grimace a bit and text it to Alan.
“Plum jam?”
Alan is a direct communicator. I’m expecting him to either tell me to eff-off or ignore me completely.
We walk down to our friends’ house for a cuppa and I check my phone – no reply.
Hmmmmm.
We catch up on each other’s news. An hour passes. I check my phone again, no word.
Then just as we’re leaving there’s a ping and I read.
“I feel like a dog that’s been kicked too many times. Lost my confidence.”
Nothing for a while and then another ping….
“Bugger it, bring me some plums.”
I run over to the orchard, shake a couple of branches and have a shopping bag filled in no time.
On our way home we stop by and I ring the buzzer at Alan’s back gate.
He opens up and I give him the bag of plums.
He takes them slowly, considered. I wish him luck.
As I go to leave he calls out:
“Keep an eye on the quinces this year, not too ripe.”
I make to plead innocence but he cuts me off.
“No excuses!”
I put my hands up in smiling surrender and skip back to the car.
Have a great week
Chris
