On a wild bit of land near our house, my brother and I would trek up a steep incline to go blueberry picking. The hard little berries were more nut like than the berries you see in the store and my mother always gamely tried to make something out of them but the results would leave me less than thrilled. The berry to sweat ratio was not even and to add insult to injury I didn't like blueberries very much. Now Raspberries are a whole different story...Let's jump ten years into the future. I am living in my first apartment and the bush that marks off where I should park my car is a pricker bush that I almost crushed the first time I backed in my car. My usually sweet tempered landlady left a nasty note on my door telling me to be careful with her berry bush....You know the kind of note, black ink and underlining words like idiot and new growth. I laughed it off. Hello it was a bush right. Right? WRONG. Summer came and showed me what a error I had made. The bush survived my winter back up and grew into a leggy pricker. My landlady tied back each runner and kept them off the ground then as if by magic the berries started to appear. Huge ruby red and full of the most amazing, sticky, bits of summer. My landlady collected all she could (except for the few that ended up in my tummy) and then the cooking started, the smell in our shared hallway was enough to send me downstairs with a slice of bread and a hang dog look on my face. She explained she was making jam and it is not an exaggeration to say that I never got more than a spoonful for that one slice of bread. That was until the year she went away for the summer. One night when the berries were ripe I got the largest bowl in my house and picked berries until I could find no more. Sweaty and with fingers that looked like I had just killed with my bare hands, I snuck upstairs to my third floor apartment and learned to can. The perfume created from all that berry boiling lingered in the hall for days. I was sure that if she decided to come home early it would be the smell in the hall that would give away my thievery and not the lack of fruit on the bushes outside. Now for those of you who haven't tried canning it really is very easy. Crushed fruit is mixed with vast amounts of sugar. Then boiled until the sugar is dissolved. Pectin is added at the end to make sure that the jam jells and then the hot jam is ladled into hot jars, covered with lids and stuck in a pan filled with boiling water for 10 minutes. Magically delicious.
Which all leads me to today. My son who is 6 is carefully carrying a plastic Hanna Montana bowl filled to the brim with sweet ruby red berries. There is a slight swagger in the way he climbs the stairs to our kitchen. He has been picking berries for our jelly and I know that when he hands them to me to make into something good, the sweat to berry ratio is just right.
