When I was about four and my brother was two, we took a long train trip from Chicago to Santa Fe. My father rode in the coach and was going to get to see the Mississippi River crossing while us kids slept in the Pullman car with our mother, our heads at opposite ends of the bunk so that our feet met in the middle. In Santa Fe we stayed with my mother’s friend Gigi. She lived in a lovely old Santa Fe house with dark ceiling rafters and a courtyard inhabited by a generally tolerant cat who drew the line (and his claws) at the idea of sitting quietly so we could read to him. After a short visit, my father went back to Chicago to hold down the family translating business, while my mother, brother and I stayed on for about two months.
The neighborhood boasted lots of apricot trees, but the neighbors had no interest whatsoever in the fruit. My mother, as a good apricot-loving, waste-hating Swiss woman, was utterly appalled by the disregarded apricots and soon obtained permission to harvest as many apricots as she wished. We climbed the trees and ate what I remember as hundreds of warm apricots. My mother and Gigi made many jars of apricot jam, which they sealed with a thin layer of paraffin. Though they must have been extremely heavy, a vast quantity of those intriguingly mismatched jars travelled back with us to Chicago and occupied a lot of real estate on the pantry shelves for many years. There was more jam than we could eat in a year. Or two years. Or three years. Eventually, the paraffin contracted and the jam in the jars developed fascinating grey mold that looked like fine wool. It looked terrible, but my mother would scrape it off and tell us that the jam itself was just fine. I thought it tasted funny and didn’t like it as well as time went on.
A couple of years ago, a neighbor here in West Virginia brought over a jar of peach brandy he had made. I took one sip and suddenly knew that my teetotaling mother had innocently given her children apricot brandy for breakfast. My father had not lived quite such an alcohol-sheltered life as my mother. After tasting Moe’s brandy, I remembered the rambling instructions on how to make peach brandy that my father would occasionally give at the breakfast table. The procedure involved burying mason jars in the ground and digging them up years later. Moe’s brandy told me those hadn’t really been random ramblings and that my father had almost certainly been discussing the apricot jam. I realized that there is absolutely no mystery where I might have gotten my own predilection for indirect communication.
After that summer, Gigi, who had been a seamstress in Vietnam before the French were evicted, came every year to Chicago and spent a month or so with us. She would set up the sewing machine in the basement and would alter and sew clothes. As a teenager I found out that our initial visit had been occasioned by what people then referred to as “a nervous breakdown” and that our stay was really to take care of her while she got back on her feet.
Lovely story, Francoise. It is funny to find the story behind our childhood memories. For me it was not being allowed to go alone to the old man's house next door. When I grew up I found that basically he had been accused of child molestation ( he had run a catholic boys school).
