MJ Pramik
20th Annual Solas Awards Bronze Winner in the Travel & Food Category
Growing up in rural Ohio, our parents “recruited” me and my siblings to help with the canning of strawberry jam, which required we search for the perfect deep ruby strawberries that intermingled with the morning’s mist.
The tiny bright fruits ripened in waves. Each day for a week we picked and filled wicker baskets to mash and sweeten and cook—filling twelve or more boiled and baked half-pint jars at a time.
My mother ladled each jar to the brim with hot oozy-thick liquid held together with pectin. She then would melt paraffin in a pan, the wax’s scent mixing with the berries and burnt sugar, and pour just enough on top of the jam to preserve it, keeping mold at bay during the winter.
When she felt she’d had enough jars of jam set aside for the cold snow months, she’d bake any extra berries into a compact, generous pie we’d devour before bedtime or at breakfast the next morning.
After strawberry jam, blackberry jelly monopolized the following weeks. Blackberries ripened around the Fourth of July. We’d follow my father into high briars twice our size that pulled at our flannel shirt long sleeves and pants. We’d leave early in the morning, 7 a.m., before the humidity and heat could discourage our picking.
Each of us carried a washed-out coffee can. We’d pick the softest mounds for sweetness. Hungry yellow jackets buzzed our family group, competing for the berry nectar.
After cooking the fruit, sugar, and pectin for hours, our mother would dump the brew into a cheesecloth in the white ceramic sink, then squeeze and squeeze until every drop possible was saved into our second-largest pot.
Her hands remained purple for at least a week.
“Black gold,” she called the jelly.
Pickles were next on our summer canning list.
We rescued baby cucumbers small enough to fit fifteen into a one-quart Mason jar from the garden vines, whose prickly pincers embedded our fingers. Pickles sank into the wash of vinegar, water, and pickling spices. After lidding and packing, my mother would place the sealed jars in our largest pot, cover them with water, and boil them for hours, or so it seemed.
She knew when to stop the boiling on those humid July evenings. She’d set the hot jars out on the counter to cool. We’d fall asleep to the popping rhythm on each jar, knowing our winter store was secure.
We would begin canning tomatoes in summer, when the smoke swirled up from the chimney.
The day was hot, humid, late August. Why the fire in the coal furnace? We saved our coal deliveries until October and never lit the furnace until autumn arrived. In late summer, the house oozed heat until three o’clock in the morning, when the countryside found a slight easing of breath and all creatures gratefully accepted a few hours of sleep.
Tomatoes required full-day attention for each batch. We’d fire up canning the rich red fruit toward the end of July, when the first rows were ready, and continue into August, when it was time for spaghetti sauce.
My father would lug bushels of tomatoes to the back porch, settling them under the white awning. Our mother brought out an old baby bathtub, white enamel with black ringed rim. We would tumble the tomatoes fresh from the vine into this white tub. Then she would lift a heavy pot of boiling water to pour over the waiting red orbs.
The tomatoes would steep in the hot bath for a few minutes, their skins loosening then letting go of the fruit. When they’d cooled enough, I’d pull one from the hot bath, smoothly slip its skin off, cut it into quarters, and toss the pieces into our second-largest pot.
When this pot was filled, my mother would heave it through the screen door to the stove, where, with a pinch of salt or maybe more, and light pepper, smashed cloves of garlic, hot green peppers, the tomatoes would cook until ready, a magic number of hours known only to my mother.
She would then fill the jars to one inch from the top, cover and tighten the lid, boil some time, then pull up and set the red-filled jars onto the counter where they would cool into the summer evening.
Listening to the radio at night, the pop, pop, pop of the tomato jars sealing would interrupt Dean Martin’s “When the Moon Hits Your Eye Like a Big Pizza Pie That’s Amore!” Our winter supply for pasta and cabbage rolls would soon rest in the fruit cellar.
These memories pop, pop, popped to mind on a trip to the Canal du Midi in central France decades later.
The French sunflowers smelled like cantaloupe in the rain. Acres—no miles—of sunflower fields, all saluting east towards my Ohio heritage, lined both banks of the Canal, the waterway built four centuries ago to connect the Atlantic Ocean and Mediterranean Sea. They reminded me of my father’s full summer garden, rows and rows of tomatoes ripening with its border of sunflowers.
On this visit, I walked through the summer fields in France while my father, at 88, recovered in the Midwest from three recent bouts of pneumonia, a collapsed lung, and the confusion that illness sometimes brings.
In so many ways, though, I felt he was with me on this journey.
Walking along the Canal one morning, I felt a deluge quicken my strides. At a run, the sunflowers on my right blended with the rain, filling the air with the essence of melon. The musky atmosphere also reminded me of how my father courted the cantaloupes in his garden in June.
He would gently lift their delicate tendrils from under the thicker vines, rearranging them for growth, and ordered his five children not to traverse the melon section of the quarter-acre plot.
We usually obeyed this command because in late July, he would call us into the kitchen to share in an especially exquisite melon. He had waited until it had fallen from the vine of its own accord. As if in a religious procession, he’d carry it to the counter. Next, he sacrificed it with his sharpest knife.
The air immediately exploded with a sweetness not often found in today’s market fruits. He’d scoop the abundant wet seeds from the center, slice thin slivers, and place one each into our tiny, upturned hands. The deep orange-pink of the flesh delighted his five small congregants.
As in a ritual benediction, we would silently eat the melon to the rind. He would then collect the seeds from this one fruit, dry and store them along with the memory and hope for more of the sweetness next year.
Had he been with me in Toulouse, we would have meandered through the St. Albans Sunday Market all morning. He’d pass the vendors with his arms folded, head slightly cocked, judging each grower by the fruits of their labors spread across full tables. Sunday in Toulouse, with its bright, clear sunlight and crystal-crisp air, would have found us, bareheaded, meandering through the weekly farmer’s market at the St. Albans church with its beige towers and fortress-like straight walls.
The aubergines had a high-gloss sheen that reflected one another as a middle-aged gentleman gently piled them into a tender pyramid. Long loaves of freshly baked bread lined the tables on our right, while flower stalls punctuated our left. He’d admired the small fragrant strawberries in their wood-slat baskets.
The vegetation in France brought to mind that of Ohio, with the plane trees, locusts, maples, and oaks.
On that trip to the Canal du Midi, I pressed a leaf of each tree into my notebook, like in elementary school when I’d walk through the woods near our home to collect samples to label and inhale.
The plane trees are anything but plain. They bow towards each other from the complementary shore to form a leafy archway under which we sailed past on the green-gray canal. Their roots gnarled and exposed at the waterline, resembling the talons of birds holding their prey. Several families of ducks hid this year’s hatchlings under rooty grids of these plane trees as our boat motors by in the evening light.
Growing and harvesting fruits and vegetables on this planet’s bulwark, we see how similar plantings charge the physical intensity of summer canning.
Scents raise up the joys of this earth, a reminder that journeys to far away lands can bring us closer to home.
Why are we surprised?
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Mary Jean (MJ) Pramik is the author of Travels on the Edge: One Woman’s Journeys on a Runaway Planet, a collection of adventure travel stories wrapped in meditations on the climate crisis. MJ earned undergraduate and graduate degrees in biological sciences, completed an MFA in Writing, and has taught writing at San Francisco State University. Her articles and essays have appeared in Nature Biotechnology, Good Housekeeping, San Francisco Chronicle, Odyssey Magazine, and the National Enquirer. She’s contributed to Travelers’ Tales “Venturing in” and Wanderland Writers anthologies and has won several Solas Travel Writing Awards. A member of the Community of Writers and the American Academy of Poets, she’s been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Communicating with screeching penguins in Antarctica and swimming with South African sharks remain high points of her sojourn on this planet.