Better than Smuckers

     When I returned home from several weeks in Sweden one year, I found long, luscious clusters of purple grapes dangling from the new arbor over my pantry roof. My grapevine, a transplant of a wild Concord grape, had produced volumes of grapes that smelled rich and sweet. When I went to bed at night, next to an open skylight directly over the pantry roof, the odor of sun-warmed grapes wafted into my dreams.

    My second night home, I awoke abruptly at a thump on the pantry roof. I stiffened, listening. Nothing moved. I leaned out the open skylight. Stealthily I picked up a long stick and poked it into the grape leaves. As I did, two lithe, dark forms exploded out from under the arbor, one leaping off the roof to the west, the other leaping downhill, to the south.

    Foxes!

    The next night I again woke up to a thump on the roof, this time accompanied by a strange breathing sound. This visitor was not a fox. I leaned out the skylight and shoved my stick into the leaves. Nothing. No movement, no sound. I started to poke into the leaves again when it occurred to me it might not be such a good idea to prod for an unknown animal. What if it were a skunk?

    I climbed down the ladder from my bedroom loft, went onto the front lawn, and shined a flashlight between the grape leaves covering the arbor and the pantry roof. Two red eyes stared at me over the end of a scrawny nose. 'Possum. 

    "Go!" I urged, poking at him with my stick. "Get out of there." He sat still, staring at me with red eyes. I poked again. He blinked. How do you run off a 'possum? I went back to bed. After a while, I heard him move slowly, with long pauses, off the roof. I have a suspicion he was eating grapes as he went.

    The next creature to welcome me home after my stint in the city had nothing to do with the grapes. One afternoon I was sitting on the built-in couch beside an open window, reading student papers, when I felt something ticklish around my bare feet. I thought vaguely it might have been my skirt, except there wasn't a breeze to move the cloth. I was engaged in my reading, and the tickling didn't go on, so I forgot about it. About fifteen minutes later, I stood and took a step. The snake that had been so cozily wound around my feet went skittering towards the wall. We looked at each other in mutual amazement, but he collected his wits first and slithered under the couch.

    There was no way for the snake to get outside unless he crossed to the back door or climbed the high steps to the adjacent room and out the open front door. But I didn't think a snake could figure out the cross-the-room maneuver, and snakes doin't climb steps, do they? Before I went to bed that night, I made him a little snake ladder out of pillows from the floor up to the couch and from the couch out the open window.

    That night, asleep in my bed under the rich aroma of ripening grapes, I dreamed of snakes, 'possums, and foxes, but there must have been a larger presence in those dreams, too, because I awoke with a different anxiety. I should pick the grapes. To let fruit rot on the vine is not only wasteful but could be dangerous. When the fruit is grapes and the vines lie on a roof, the danger is bears. Harvesting grapes is not an option but a safety factor, so that very day I delved into the harvest of volumes of grapes. Even after giving bunches to friends and pounds to a neighbor who makes wine, I still had enough hanging over the roof to fatten a bear for the winter. From those grapes I would make jelly. To keep me from growing as fat as a bear this winter, I would give grape jelly to friends for Christmas. 

    So I picked grapes, made juice, and turned juice into jelly. As the work went on and on, I began to wonder how much a jar of Smuckers costs.

    But I couldn't give my friends Smuckers for Christmas. Think what they would miss if they opened a jar of Smuckers.

    They would miss the rich odor of grapes in warm autumn air as I climbed the stepladder. They would miss the tangle of vines dangling over the pantry wall and the sunlight on the roof dimmed by the broad palms of the leaves. They would miss the push of my hands through the vines as I plucked long clusters of dusky dark grapes to lay in a flat basket with a rising mound of plump, Roman-feast grapes, shiny black under blue-dust outer coats, beautiful as a Chardin painting. They would miss the hovering fear, every night before harvest, of bears on the roof.

    Inside the house, they would miss the smooth roll of stemmed grapes through my fingers, like wet marbles, each one shiny with oozed juices. They would miss the transformation from smooth, distinguishable roundness to indistinguishable mass as I squashed grapes with my potato masher, and I was sorry they wouldn't be missing the eruption of grapes between my toes as I danced on my grapes to crush them, the way peasant girls do, but I don't have the vats. They would miss the transfer of colors from dark purple grapes with light green interiors to bright red juice instantly staining the cheesecloth bag blood-purple and from that color to the dark red-purple of jelly in the jar. They would miss the light pink foam skimmed from the juice on its first boiling, the frenzied rush of tiny bubbles rising volcanically to the top of the pot with a quiet sizz, my horrified gasp as the boiling mass poured over the top of the pot like hot lava, and the searing smell of burnt sugar as it hit the burner. They would miss the cool, smooth, hard touch of the new oak floor on my bare feet as I crossed from the stove to the sink with a steaming pot of pulp, and they would miss the pushing, the prodding, the squeezing on the cheesecloth bag to extract the juice. They would miss the clear-red stream of hot liquid jelly poured into jars, the bright purple-red splotches of spills staining my blue and white checkered kitchen towel, the intermittent snap of seals as the jars cooled, and the soft October sunlight aslant through the windows highlighting eight, twelve, sixteen, twenty-seven jars of jelly cooling on the table.

    How could I give my friends Smuckers for Christmas when I could give them instead a jar of jelly with such a genie?

Next week's post: "A Gift to Appreciate"

Recipe from this post: Grape jelly

GRAPE JELLY

Ingredients

(These ingredients are given not for quantities but for proportions.)

4 cups of grapes, slightly underripe

1/2 cup of water, approximately

1 apple

3/4 to 1 cup sugar

Preparation

Wash from the grapes the debris of the woods that has fallen on them. Remove the stems from the grapes. Crush the grapes. Quarter but don't peel the apple.

To make the juice

Put the grapes in a large kettle along with the water and the quartered apple. Boil until grapes are soft and begin to lose their color (10 minutes or so). Strain through a jelly bag into a bowl. Let the grape juice drain into the bowl for several hours or overnight.

To make the jelly

Put the juice (don't try to work with more than 4 cups per batch; my 4 cups of grapes yielded 2 cups of juice) into a large enamel or stainless steel pan and simmer for five minutes. Skim off the froth. Add sugar, stirring until dissolved. Let the jelly boil till it reaches 8 degrees higher than the boiling point of water in your locality, at which point it should be nicely thickened.

Warm the candy thermometer before inserting it into the boiling jelly and place it where it isn't touching the bottom of the pan. If you have the misfortune, as I did, of breaking your thermometer during the jelly-making process by knocking it against the stove, you can still make successful jelly by cooking the juice with the sugar just long enough to bring it to the point of jelling. You can tell when that is by testing for the "sheeting stage" with a spoon. Begin to test the jelly 10 minutes after adding the sugar. Place a small amount of jelly on a spoon, cool it slightly, and let the jelly drop back into the pan from the side of the spoon. When the drop is no longer light and syrupy but thickens to form two large drops that come together and fall as a single drop, you'll know the jelly has reached the sheeting stage and should be removed from the heat.

    Pour into hot sterilized jars and seal the lids.