Mulberry Jam

One Saturday in late April, Caroline and Iain and I were walking back from somewhere - probably Alon's or the Farmer's Market - and Caroline noticed the mulberries on the tree in Vita and Alex's yard.  She told us that she'd never known mulberries were edible, til one day when - as part of a school-organized field trip - she and some classmates and their advisor had spent the day riding MARTA and visiting local sites in Atlanta.  Somewhere they had come upon a mulberry tree, and her advisor picked some berries and ate them. 

We talked about making mulberry jam.  It seemed like it might be fun to do, even if it wasn't very good.  When I got home, I found a recipe on line, and emailed Vita and asked if it was okay if we picked some mulberries.  She said yes, and I bought some jars and pectin (we had plenty of sugar), but then I left town for a trip and we didn't get any made that weekend.

It wasn't til a couple of weeks later, on Mother's Day, that Iain and I walked up the street with a metal colander and picked what I guessed to be a quart of mulberries.  They were beautiful, I thought, so I took a picture of them:

Each berry had tightly attached to it a quarter-inch-long green stem.  In the instructions with the on line recipe I'd found, the writer said it was too much trouble to take off the stems, but I cut them off with scissors as I sorted the berries.

I washed and sterilized the jars and then started on the jam.  It didn't seem possible that the jam could boil - the recipe just called for berries and sugar and a little bit of lemon juice - but it did, and at some point something magic happened and it suddenly turned translucent and a beautiful claret color.  It was, I think, the most beautiful jam I'd ever seen. 

It also was, quite possibly, the best jam we'd ever had.  It was delicious!  I left a jar for Vita and Alex, and gave one to my friend Karen when she was in town.  Now we have about half a jar left, of the six half-pints that we made that day.  I was hoping that we could make another batch, but Caroline and I walked by the tree earlier this morning, and there are no more mulberries.

She is sitting at the dining room table across from me, now, eading the New York Times and eating wild plums that we just got at the Farmer's Market.  No more mulberry jam til  next year.  We'll just have to make do, somehow.

The Day After the World Didn't End

It's May 22, and the world didn't end yesterday.  It wouldn't have been a good time for the world to end - Sarah is in Germany, and Iain at a Boy Scout outing.  It was not that clear to me exactly when it was supposed to happen (6 p.m. local time or 6 p.m. Pacific Time?), but if it was local time, Tom and Caroline weren't home either - it was just me and the dog.  I think I was sorting laundry.  It wasn't how I'd want to spend my last moments before the world ended.  It would definitely have been a waste of time doing the laundry at all, much less sorting it.

There was an article in the Times on Friday about a family in Maryland.  The parents were convinced that the world was going to end - the mother had quit her job and they had stopped saving for college for their 3 teenage children - and the kids were just embarrassed by the whole thing.  You have to wonder about the people who emptied their savings accounts to buy billboards announcing the world was ending.  What do you do, when it doesn't?

The last time Harold Camping announced the world was ending and it didn't was in 1994.  He said, afterwards, he'd made a mistake in the calculations, but this time he was absolutely certain.  There's been no word from Mr. Camping since yesterday, so we don't know yet what he's going to say this time.  But in the press stories this morning there's puzzlement from the people who believed, and some expressions of sympathy and concern for them from others.  (And of course plenty of material for Jon Stewart and the other late night comedians, as if they needed any more.)

Tom and I had decided, earlier in the day, that if the world was going to end we might as well be drinking champagne, and if it wasn't going to end, well, that was something to celebrate.  So I put a bottle in the fridge during the afternoon, but when we pulled the cork, it was flat and not drinkable.  We'd kept it too long.  So we put another bottle on ice that I thought might be newer and once it was cold, we opened it, and it wasn't drinkable either.  By this point it was well after 9 p.m. (6 p.m. PDT) and the world had not ended.  The third bottle still had some bubbles left, and we all drank to the world not ending.

So here's the take home message, besides not quitting your job and emptying out your savings account when told by an elderly religious broadcaster from Oakland that the world is ending.  We clearly are not celebrating enough.  It should not take the end of the world to open a bottle of champagne.  We'll do better, going forward. 

But now it's time to get dressed, walk the dog, and enjoy the day.  I'm glad we're all still here.  The mockingbirds are queued up to get to the suet feeder at the window, and there's a cardinal on the other feeder.  Bullwinkle's asleep just outside the back door.  A chipmunk just ran across the back yard.  Time to get going for the day.

Tornado Season

I was out of town when the tornadoes hit, week before last.  Seeing the images on CNN that Thursday morning was heart-breaking.  Calling home, to make sure Atlanta had not been hit.  (I figured CNN would have mentioned that if it had, but just checking.)  Since then, reading about the devasting tornadoes that hit Tuscaloosa and Birmingham and lots of other towns with names that aren't so well known.  Little towns that probably were struggling to keep their downtowns from closing and people moving to bigger towns even before the tornado hit.  Now their downtown is gone and so are a lot of the houses.  Towns where people were born, grew up, got married, and had their children are just gone.

I grew up in Oklahoma and Kansas, and I have strong memories of fear of tornadoes.  Not actual tornadoes - I lived in towns that experienced devastating tornadoes, but they were either before I was born or when I was too young to remember them (and not in the part of town where we lived) - but hearing sirens, and (when we lived in a house with a basement) a few times going to the basement until a particularly strong storm passed.

I went to high school in Woodward, Oklahoma, which had been hit by a devastating tornado in 1947.  Hundreds of homes, damaged or destroyed, and about a hundred people killed in Woodward.  I remember a grave, at Elmwood Cemetery, marked "Unidentified Girl," but there were two unidentified children found in the rubble of the tornado in Woodward, a girl of about 12 and a baby girl.  According to Mike Coppock's compelling accound of the Woodward tornado, there was speculation "that the powerful storm blew them in from Texas, even though the farthest a human body was known to have been carried by a tornado was a mile."

Caroline and I were in Woodward, visiting my mother, in May 2004, when a storm system unleased a series of tornadoes south and east of Woodward.  One of them hit Geary, the town where my parents met as school teachers in the 1930s.  The storms were moving away from us, not toward us, so there wasn't any sense of personal threat - but we kept the television on and watched, mesmerized, as the storm system moved across western Oklahoma.   They knew exactly where the tornadoes were, with great precision, and tracked them from intersection to intersection.  Talking about that evening later, to friends in Atlanta, I said that the local TV stations in Oklahoma cover weather the way the Atlanta stations cover traffic.  Driving back to Oklahoma City to the airport, I remember we saw some storm damage north of Geary - a galvanized metal structure on its size, and broken trees - but it wasn't a really strong tornado and there weren't many people in its path.

The paths of these tornadoes - the ones that just hit Alabama and Georgia and other southeastern states - were long and wide and went through populated areas.  Hundreds of people died, thousands lost their homes.  Lynsley shared the information the other day that there will be a truck at Morningside Presbyterian Church on Wednesday to collect relief supplies.  We bought peanut butter and a big corregated box of diapers at Target yesterday and will be doing some more shopping before Wednesday.  So check the list of what they need and make a trip to your favorite store so you can give a little something to some people who have lost everything.  And if you can't make it this week, they will be there every Wednesday through the end of the month.