Back when we were newly married, my husband was working on his master’s degree and I was working; we were pretty busy, but not really, when you think about the natural chaos inherent with raising the four kids that came in six years a little later. So. I discovered a farmer couple where a couple of their apricot trees were set aside for her pin money, and to my great delight, she sold me a 27-pound crate of ‘cots for all of five bucks. But make sure you remember to bring back that crate. Sure, no problem.
Twenty-seven pounds! I’d been wanting to be like my mom, who would put up a thousand pounds of fruit in a year after our trips as itinerant harvesters at pick-your-own farms. Well, not that much like my mom; there were just the two of us to cook for for the moment. But I figured, I loved apricots, couldn’t beat the price, and it was a great place to start playing grownup.
We spent a Saturday together, boiling, cooking, sterilizing, freezing, putting up apricots in every form you could think of. Mostly bottled halves and jam, lots of jam. Rows and rows of jars, at the end of a very long and tiring day of hard hot work, gleaming, gorgeous, heathery-fruited jars of deep orange jam, the color of the early sunset.
And my sweet new husband turned to me, and with a gentle smile, confessed what he’d kept to himself the whole time: “You know? I don’t really like apricots.”
He’d waited till it was all done to let me know, so I wouldn’t be disappointed.
We gave most of it to his sister when we moved away. Not all, but most.