July 2024

There’s a jar of blackberry jam in the freezer. A neighbor left it on the front porch last July as a thank you for a kindness the girl has long forgotten doing. But the girl thinks about the jam often. I know because she’ll pull it out, turn the full, frosted glass in her too cold hands and look at the solid pink mess inside. 

There’s no world in which the jar does not contain the best jam she’s ever had. She knows the neighbor. She knows the bushes where the berries were picked and the road up the mountain she walked to get there. She knows the family of deer that bed down in the grass beside them. She knows that familiarity is an ingredient you don’t stock in the pantry, but in relationships with the world, and so this has to be the best possible jam. 

She hasn’t tried it though. 

When she found it sweating on the doorstep that evening a year ago, she tucked it into the freezer, too tired to think about eating, and promised herself she’d put it away until she really needed it. She’d save it for a hard day, maybe a cold one, when she’s desperate for something that tastes like summer. 

I’ve been holding it there for her since. 

There were days when she would have tried it. She might have. If someone else would go through the hassle of defrosting it and finding a clean spoon, she might have eaten the whole thing. 

But it never quite got there. We’ve made it to July again and there’s still jam in the freezer. 

And here’s something important to know: it doesn’t really matter, whether or not she ate the jam. If she wanted to, if she needed it, if she had a sweet tooth or a shit day, I’d want her to have it if she wanted it. 

I’d share it with her. I’d taste it on her sticky hands trailing up the banisters to the little attic room. We’d pass it back and forth in bed. I’d still find it after in the sheets thrown down to the kitchen floor and waiting for a wash. It would be lovely. Could be lovely. But no one’s eaten the jam yet. 

We’ve gotten ourselves here, to another July, and the bushes are full again, the berries are getting dark, the deer are bedding down, and all of it, every leaf and cricket and cornstalk and rain, I want to put in a jar. I want to set aside some summer, sweetened on the stovetop, and keep it in the freezer. Safe and away until we need it. In case we want it. 

It’d be a shame not to have it, 

the apple house