Life in the Countryside

The reason I've not been blogging is we've been making jam. We live surrounded by trees and vine, apples, grapes, jujubes, almonds, prunes, and olives. The past years there's been no one to harvest, so much of the the fruit had ended up rotting on the ground.

Now here Pierre and I are. Being extreme creatures, predictably we have transformed from free spirits to sensible country folk. Why, said these two budding paysans, we can't let all that good food go to waste!

So we take a kilo of sugar and a kilo of fruit, put them in a giant casserole and bring to a boil, stirring all the while. Once all sticky, the mixture is spooned into sterilized jars that cool upside down. (We've done this so many times that these days, when I sweat I swear that my armpits smell of something sweet and syrupy.)

After all our efforts, we have now in stock, in glass containers of various shapes and sizes, some 15 liters of preserved fruit. Last night we looked content upon our cupboards, imagining ourselves waking up with the sun, sitting down to cups of strong coffee and plates of warm bread that we top with slabs of butter and spoons of our delicious homemade jam, fig being our favorite. It would be the perfect way to start a day spent outdoors, him doing things like mending fences and pruning trees, me maybe harvesting late tomatoes.

Then his phone rang, a client calling. A reality check as we remembered: we roll out of bed at ten to work all day in front of computers, indoors. And we don't even eat breakfast.