Chapter 1: Seven Cups (Artifact #1)

My dad is the best jam-maker I know.  When we were younger, he would get us all crammed in our hot summer kitchen.  My sister, mother, and I.  We were Operation Jam, and each year was a different flavour.  Sometimes, we did strawberry.  Once grape.  My personal favourite was raspberry. It was something about the graininess.  Not the mess it made in your teeth, but the way the seeds dug into your tongue like good salt and vinegar chips.   Dad’s favourite flavour was hands-down blueberry.  He’d say it like that too. I’m Having Hands-Down Blueberry.  He used to heap on pile after pile on his toast, or on his many English muffins.  Though he got better.  He learned to decipher the foreign language of my mother’s various body movements. 

Get Back To Work, his voice would chime, saying something he would say if I were there, lingering as I did, not really working.  Because Girls Don’t Have To Work, I’d say.  And he’d say, Sure They Do.  They Work All the Time in the Kitchen in his mock voice that knows it’s wrong, and so is right. 

But jam-making isn’t easy, you know.  It’s a lot of work.  What with all the picking, the de-stemming, the boiling up and the boiling down.  Come On Now, he’d get me to come over and really get into a task.  Pick One.  Either the pouring, the tasting, the digesting, or the losing.  Somehow my dad knew jam-making like a science.  He could sense from the look of the strawberries and sugar if it was ready to be poured.  His almost physic understanding of the fruit foretold whether it would hold or fall.  And he was so meticulous with his roles, the things he must do in case Mom or my sister or I messed up.  It was so very important we got every step right.  Although we’ve made less and less jam over the years.  Perhaps it’s the exuberant effort.  The seemingly countless cups of sugar it takes.  His now conceivable death.  See, he’d say, Watch It Froth When You Add To It.  He’d lean in and point towards the obvious churning colour, the inaccessible state of being good.  Good, merely because you have learned how to do it right ...