I pulled myself back to the present, registered the still-running engine of the mower, and finished the path to the berries. But the experience followed me back through the meadow and up to the house. As I sat on the deck looking out at Bear Mountain and Burke in the distance, I could not shake the longing I felt. Melancholy mixed with a tender, sweet memory.
The sudden appearance of a hummingbird quickly altered my thoughts. He was on his way to the ruby bells tinkling over the edge of the flowerpot not three feet away from where I was sitting. Stopping midair and hovering there, his wings whirring out to each side, he looked like a crucifix momentarily suspended in front of me. Surely a celestial being, a seraph; he was a blur of wings. Then, he was off to the business of gathering fuel from the ringing blossoms.
How simple it is to assign the supernatural to hummingbirds, to fit them into some spiritual metaphor. Indeed, with their bright plumage iridescing in the sun, how could they not become emblems of joy? But, the colors that bounce off their feathers are pigments mixed only by our eyes when we add the element of light. And when we do we name them after what they most resemble: rubies, amethysts, topaz jewels. Or, we take note of their enchanting and flickering flight and dub them purple-crowned fairies, violet-tailed sylphs. More often than not, when we think of hummingbirds, it is as delicate, nectar-sipping things, diminutive spirits that spend their time feasting on ambrosia and beauty.
But the little creatures are omnivorous beings. All manner of insects find their way up those slender, delicate-looking bills. And the life we see as devoted to kissing flowers is, in reality, a struggle to stay alive. The tiny birds have voracious hearts and must feed nearly constantly in order to live. Place a hummingbird feeder outside your window and you can watch altruism and generosity fly away: it quickly becomes territory. Pity any fool that dares alight on its sweet shores! The dominant hummer will deliver a dazzling sideswipe. In fact, the little hummingbird is the originator of “shock and awe.” Blazing warriors, they duel and joust for sustenance. By day’s end, the exhausted things have little energy left. At night their rapid-fire hearts slow to a dangerously low rate. Dropping from nearly five hundred beats per minute to as little as thirty-six, the nocturnal gamble becomes whether or not they will have enough energy in the morning to rev their insatiable hearts up to a life-sustaining rhythm. Some never see the dawn.
Those that wake to a new day haven’t the time to bother with yesterday—or tomorrow, for that matter. The future is contained for them in each moment’s drop of nectar. If their heart is beating, the only question becomes how to spend those heartbeats. And there’s only room for one answer. They live fiercely, spending their heartbeats wildly. Making hay while the sun shines.
Preservation
I’m haunted by a pickle.
The kitchen shelves glimmer with jars of homemade preserves after a summer’s worth of gardening, harvesting, and putting up. Strawberry and wild blueberry preserves glisten and glow in their glass cases like gemstones. Clove-scented beets glow deep garnet, and the cauliflower sparkles crystalline, bejeweled with tiny, bright-red, and lethally hot Thai peppers. Brandied blackberries await syrupy slides down midwinter bowls of ice cream or late-night waffles. Freshly jarred applesauce spiked with a bit of vanilla cools off after its recent dip in the canner’s hot water bath. Zucchini pickles stack up right next to the gingered green beans. Honey dills, bread n’ butters, sweet and sours, gherkins, mustard pickles and relishes: everything’s here. Everything except the tiny pickles my grandmother used to put up in glass jars with glass lids and rubber seals, the ones she’d set on the wobbly wooden cellar stairs in expectation of family dinners around the old oak table, its wooden length stretched by seemingly innumerable leaves and warmed by the old wood-fired cookstove.
I’ve spent the summer canning and preserving. Each evening, after a day’s worth of picking, peeling, boiling, and packing, I listen attentively for that satisfying pop as the lids expel the last of the air trapped in the jar, creating a safe and long-lasting vacuum, one that will insure garden-picked taste in snow-covered January. But there is no satisfaction when it comes to the itty-bitty sour pickles I’m craving. Always at the table while I was growing up, and now the recipe is long since lost. Cheek suckingly sour and smaller than my childhood fingers, they were a staple of the New England boiled dinners that so often appeared at the table along with sons and daughters, aunts and uncles and cousins. Part of the satisfaction of eating them was the challenge of fishing the little things out of the jar. You might think you had a good hold on one but then, like a shimmering fish, it would slip through your fingers and splash back into the briny depths. But oh, once caught and brought to your lips, it promised something beyond the ordinary. I can still recall the shock of sour at first bite, how the vinegar squirted over my tongue and the exquisite tingling that would dance between my cheeks, making my mouth water with abandon. But try as I might, I cannot seem to duplicate the jolting flavor of my Grandmother’s pickles.
If I had known as a child that I’d be craving her pickles now, that I would spend an entire summer trying to find that mysterious combination of snap, sour, and surprise, I would have asked her for the recipe and carefully copied it down in my best childhood penmanship. But I didn’t think anything of it then. How could I? I never thought that there might come a day when there would be no pickles lined up on the cellar stairs, or that the old table would no longer groan under the weight of boiled dinners, or that grandmothers, mothers and fathers, aunts and uncles and cousins would disappear one by one from the table.
Still, the tongue remembers, it reminisces: a bite of the past, a spoonful of summer, a taste of home . . . the bottle of vinegar passed with the plate of root vegetables at family gatherings, my mother and her brother fighting over the last of the parsnips. Aunts gathered in the kitchen afterwards, all in their flowery aprons and housecoats, washing the dishes, and the menfolk returning when it was time to run whatever was left of the boiled dinner through the food mill so that, in the morning, there would be red flannel hash for breakfast. And those sure and dependable pickles, small but steadfast, passed round the table at every gathering.
Once they even showed up out in the maple grove at my uncle’s sugar shack when the grownups threw a traditional sugar-on-snow party for the kids. Our eyes wide in anticipation and our pant legs frozen stiff from playing in the snow, we watched the thick maple syrup, boiled until it was nearly candy, turn gooey and chewy as it was drizzled over chunks of icy snow. The adults ate theirs with bites of the little pickles in order to cut the sweetness. Like my young cousins, at the time I found the concept of balancing sweet with sour an absurd one. But I was mesmerized by the unexpected appearance of that familiar jar of pickles in the snowy woods.
My partner has his own pickle ghost: half-sours put up in an earthen crock by his Polish aunt and set in the cool basement to ripen and turn. On visits he would paddle quietly downstairs with his brother, and together they would sneak as many of the big dills as their little hands and stomachs could handle. Careful to replace the heavy stoneware plate that held the pickles submerged in brine, the two boys thought they were very clever. Cioci (Auntie) never said a word, but simply kept the crock full with cucumbers picked from her large and well-tended garden. This summer we tried to make Cioci’s pickles, too. But had she kept the crock covered with a square of cheesecloth or a heavy lid? Did she leave the stem ends of the cukes intact, as we’d read in some recipes, and shave off a bit from the blossom end? Or include a grape leaf for extra crunch? The memory was mostly about sneaking the pickle, not making it.
Our first try was a salty disaster. Another batch seemed to hold some promise but then suddenly turned to mush. Ultimately, after reading dozens of variations on fermenting cucumbers in a crock, we realized we were following steps to make a finished pickle when what we really wanted was something more immediate and clandestine, something forbidden: a pickle that would make our hearts pound as we reached for it.
So we’ve spent the summer in a pickle, as it were, trying to recapture a pair of lost recipes: the salty crunch of Cioci’s half-sours and the compact zing of Gram’s little cornichons. The tricky part was that each of us was trying to recapture not just a pickle but a pickled memory. The challenge was how to add to the crock the thrill of sneaking a bite, or stir in the damp, earthy