July 11 - July 15 Much Ado About Strawberry Preserves or Less is More

                                                               Indigo dyed yarn drying


2010-Either the chicory was early this year or the Queen Anne’s Lace was late, but finally they are appearing together along the roadsides.  Some years they are accompanied by purple loosestrife which is one of my favorite nature made arrangements.  I saw some loosestrife along the road on the way back from Boston, but not around here.  Perhaps the non-native eradication program is working.  In any case, the Mary-blue and frilly white roadsides are the wall paper for high summer. The desire to stretch these days out o their maximum is accompanied by a sort of growing horror at the shortening of days.  Only twenty minutes less than the maximum of the solstice, I try to reassure myself, but I know that the pendulum is gathering speed. There is an actual ache in my heart in anticipation of summer’s end. It is certainly partly a product of the school calendar and now that I am free of that I would like to be able to accept the movement towards winter, the ‘rising yin ether’ with more than good grace; actual full acceptance.  Meanwhile, I try to spend every possible minute outside.
2013-Hardly any Queen Anne’s Lace yet, this year it’s chicory with something low and yellow-hop clover maybe. I never saw the two together before.
When you finally ‘grok’ something, it’s hard to communicate because everything you can think to say about it is a cliché or at the very least, self-evident.  You are what’s different because now you get it. This was all precipitated by a batch of strawberry jam I made after gathering quarts of berries at an organic farm a couple of weeks ago. I don’t really have a sweet tooth and prefer bitter marmalade to jam when I use anything like that at all. But here were all these berries and I had to do something, so I tried a low temperature, low sugar, reducing method-kind of like sun preserves but in a low oven. It was absolutely incredible, concentrated strawberry flavor, dark in color and with some natural tartness still remaining.  So I had a jar of this amazing stuff that I made myself from berries I picked-special and unique in a way money can't buy. All the wanting people have for stuff was revealed to be exactly because they don’t have it, once it’s acquired, the next thing has more allure. But this was the preserve I had and at the same time the only one I wanted and it struck me so deeply as a lesson in how to look with gratitude and appreciation at everything I have. It actually felt like a miracle.