Week 4 - Childhood memoir

In my opinion, grocery shopping is just about the most unpleasant of the "household chores" that fall upon me as the full time, stay-at-home parent.  I never seem to time it right, so I am always squeezing through the jam-packed aisles, trying to navigate around unruly and wandering children, and avoid getting stuck behind the little scooter carts.  On top of all of the navigation issues, I have to remember what I need to buy, since I almost always forget my list on the counter at home, or in the car, or somewhere that I haven't remembered yet.  So as I am crawling down the aisles, I scan all the items on the shelf in an attempt to get everything that I need so I don't miss anything and have to make yet another trip. 

This week I clearly remembered my son yelling out from the kitchen about my lack of jelly options available.

"Moooommm!  We don't have any good jelly"

"We have three or four different kinds in there.  There's grape, blackberry, raspberry, and I think I have some of the blueberry stuff left.  What good jelly don't we have?"

"We don't have any strawberry! Geeze, how un-American can you be?  What's a PB&J without strawberry?"

It was true, we didn't have strawberry jelly.  I had this thing about strawberry jelly ever since I was a kid. 

One particular summer stands out in my memory.  I wasn't going to be babysitting everyday for Mrs. Adams this summer and I had been looking forward to long quiet days, with trips to the lake and camp out sleepovers with my girlfriends.  Just as school finished for the year, my mom and dad had bought this huge old cargo-type van.  It was brick red and I remember thinking how creepy it was since it was the kind of van you picture when you hear about kids being abducted, or creepy guys selling drugs.  It was almost completely stripped inside, no carpeting or vinyl covering the bare metal of the floors, walls, or roof.  It also had no seats in the back.  My parents, being rather clever I suppose, had bought a couple of school bus seats and bolted them to the floor off to one side, so that there were seats for us four kids to sit in, instead of sliding around on the floor.  Mostly I refused to ride in it at all, as a pre-teen there was no way that I wanted anyone to see me in it, although there were no windows in the back so that wasn't much of an issue, but it was the principle.

Mom was really excited this particular summer because we would be able to take the van when we went strawberry picking.  Instead of squeezing quarts of loose berries in the trunk of the car, we would be able to neatly lay out the quarts on the floor in the back of the van.  We all packed in the van and rumbled down the road towards the strawberry farm.  When we got there, we found a "good spot" according to my dad, although any spot looks "good" when you are in the middle of acres of strawberries, and I was sent to buy the quart boxes.  Usually we got ten or so.  I would watch the man carefully count out ten from the huge sleeve of odd green colored cardboard boxes, and pay him with the two quarters my parents gave me.  This time, dad pulled out his wallet and gave me a five dollar bill.

"Go ahead and buy a whole sleeve this time.  Mom wants to get a whole bunch of berries since we have the room to bring them home in the van."

"But that's a hundred quarts!  That will take forever!  And what in the world are we gonna do with that many strawberries?"

He just smiled and waved my objections away, turning to help my mom smear the little kids with sunscreen.  Handing the man the five, I noticed his smirk as he pulled one of the towers of boxes out of it's plastic wrapping.  He must have noticed the disgusted look on my face as I took the boxes.  I tromped away, up the mile long aisle of plants with the stack of boxes leaning on my shoulder.  Arriving back at our "base camp," I was waiting for Mom to see the huge stack and tell me that was way too many, but she didn't.  She just smiled and told me to set them next to the side door of the van.  My bothers and sister scampered up to get boxes to fill, although I knew that they would spend most of their time eating and throwing the berries at each other, leaving the actual filling of the boxes to Mom, Dad, and me.

We were there for hours.  I kept the van in sight, glancing now and then to see how many boxes were left to fill.  The stack of empty boxes was slowly shrinking, but even after all that time, it was still tall enough that it was leaning against the door of the van.  I heard Dad eventually call out for us to come back to the van.  Thinking that he was finally giving in and admitting that we weren't going to fill all of those boxes, I quickly filled my last quart, thankfully, and headed to the van.

As I rounded the front of the van, I expected to see Mom and Dad packing up, counting the quarts, and washing berry-stained faces.  Instead I saw Dad laying out a small blanket between rows and Mom handing out sandwiches from a large paper bag.  We weren't done, we were taking a lunch break.  Taking my sandwich and sitting on the bumper of the van I thought it was kinda funny that I was eating a PB&J with strawberry jelly in a strawberry field.  Chuckling I mentioned it to Mom, and she smiled along with me. 

"That's why we're getting so many berries.  I'm going to make jelly."

The smile slipped off my face.  I remembered the jelly making a couple of years before.  We had made eight or nine big mason jars full last time, but it was a long, tedious, nasty, hot, steam-filled memory of strawberries in my kitchen.  Looking in the van I could see that we already had three or four times as many berries as we had when we made jelly last time, and my stomach clenched.  Since it was summer vacation, and since I wasn't babysitting for Mrs. Adams this year, I was going to be home everyday with little chance of missing the great jelly-making.

I spent the rest of the day trying to think of suggestions of what to do with strawberries that wouldn't turn our house into a sauna.  Picking and picking and picking more berries, filling the stupid green boxes, hating the berries more and more and more.  Near dinner time we finally stopped.  The pile of empty green boxes was gone, and so was the floor of our van.  Two little spaces were left next to the bolted-down seats, so us kids wouldn't step on the stupid berries on the ride home, but the rest of the floor was covered in mounds of red berries.  You couldn't even see the green of the boxes anymore, since Dad always took a quart or two and poured them over the other boxes, just to make sure they were as full as possible, since we paid by the number of quarts.  I remember thinking, as the van rumbled off down the road, leaving the fields behind, that Dad could have just as easily spent the money he paid for all those berries on jelly at the grocery store - eliminating the need to make jelly and all of the steamy work that went with it.

We did end up making jelly that week, tons and tons of it.  I spent two whole days escaping the kitchen by hulling and slicing strawberries on the front steps of the house five quarts at a time.  Finally, surprisingly, depressingly, there weren't anymore to be hulled or sliced, and I was pulled into the kitchen work.  I don't remember a lot about working in the kitchen with Mom to make the jelly, maybe my mind blocked it out because it was just too awful.  I know that I spent a lot of time putting my hands into the kitchen sink filled with ice water after spilling hot water or even hotter, liquid molten strawberry on them. 

I have hated cooked strawberries in any form ever since.  Obviously after our jelly-making, we had dozens and dozens of jars of strawberry jelly.  We gave some to family or friends, but mostly we ate it - all summer, through the fall and winter, and again all the next summer, and on, and on, and on.  I wouldn't be surprised if my parents still had some of it in the back corners of the pantry in our old house.  We also were able to strike jelly off of every grocery list, 'well, we don't need jelly' they would say, chuckling like it was funny.  For the next five years, until I moved out of the house after high school, I had nothing but strawberry jelly for my morning toast or PB&J unless I was at a restaurant or friends house.  I didn't own strawberry jelly for years afterward, only buying some when my son wanted it for lunches after preschool.  Even today, I would rather eat toast plain rather than put previously molten, strawberry jelly on it.  I will never look at a strawberry the same way.

So in the store, standing before the plethora of jelly options, I looked for the tell-tale red label of strawberry.  Grimacing at the various brands and sizes, I grabbed the smallest jar of no-name brand of strawberry and continued on down the lane.