Apricot Marmalade

Fresh apricots, particularly good if tree-ripened, are one of my favorite fruits. My backyard tree hasn't produced even one cot yet but I've been enjoying some really good ones my daughter brought to me from a local organic food co-op. So-o-o good!

Years ago when I lived in Ogden, Utah, there was a mature tree growing in a neighbor's yard next to our apartment. It produced heavily one season. A couple of weighted down branches hung over the fence close to my back door. The first sun of the morning warmed and ripened each fruit to perfection. I was in apricot heaven. Many went to waste on the ground on the neighbor's side. They didn't mind that I sampled some of those hanging just within my reach. I'm sure I asked if it was okay. It would be out of character for me not to have asked. Oh my. I don't know if I asked. Something to put on my "So Sorry" list!

Evelyn, my brother's wife, made apricot marmalade each canning season. My job was to crack the nuts--the pits or stones inside--with a hammer. The nuts were mixed with the fruit. When I left home for the big city, tucked into my meager belongings was a jar of my favorite apricot marmalade. A parting gift at the end of each visit to the farm as a young bride and then a mother was a jar of the marmalade. There isn't any store-bought spread that tastes like my old favorite. Freezer jam comes close. My son-in-law's son brought me boxes of cots some years ago. M-m-m, small and sweet. so easy to pop one in my mouth while making the jam. Fresh apricots are still a treat. When I eat them, as I did for breakfast this morning, I think of Evelyn's marmalade spread thick on fresh, homemade bread that has been slathered with real butter and settles so wonderfully on the tongue.

There were no apricot trees on the farm. My parents grew several kinds of apples. The orchard grew at the corner where the barnyard became a lane leading to the public road that passed by our house. There was an irrigation ditch at that spot. Beside it grew the most beautiful wild, golden-yellow roses. The bees loved their intoxicating fragrance and were only too happy to pollinate the orchard and the gardens in return. I ate lots of green apples, as a kid, with salt on the really green ones that were barely big enough to pick and had to be wrestled off the lowest branches. There was one tree that Mother called a Yellow Transparent that produced the first fruit of the season. I must have eaten bushels of those, so good--tart-sweet-- with peel so thin it was almost see-through. Mother dried lots of the apples--washed, de-wormed and sliced--in flour sacks pinned to the clothes line. She also dried fresh corn cut from the cob, shelled peas, and raspberry leaves in the same way, the vegetables for soup and the leaves for medicinal tea.

Raspberry canes grew all along the clothesline on the west side of the house. Also, red and black currents and gooseberry bushes. Our neighbors, the Maughns, shared their plums--Pottawatomie, Greengage, Italian Prune. Mother volunteered me to be the one to crawl on my belly through the thickets to glean the ripest fruit for jam.

One taste of the pancake syrup or jelly Mother made from wild Chokecherries that grew along the road up Weston Canyon made the work to get them well worth it! I think she had the most fun picking wild blackberries along the side of the road in Renton or Seattle when she visited MerLyn despite the gouges, cuts, and scratches from the heavy-duty thorns on those bushes.

Savoring apricots, fresh from the tree or cooked into a marmalade, is a part of who I am.