I'm not sure if I actually remember this as I was only 3 in the picture where I am on my knees before a wonderfully huge galvanized metal bowl full of lusciously red strawberry goo, my little shirt rolled up to the shoulders as I stick my hands in to mix the jam. When I look at the pictures, though, I can feel the sticky warm fragrant jam between my fingers, beaded with strawberry seeds and lumpy bits of soft fruit, the thick, heady scent of fresh strawberries, truly fresh, sun-ripened strawberries that grew in beds I ran with my little bare feet, filling the kitchen and warming the house. I can taste it in the stolen drips we licked from our fingers, ruby red and hot and sweet and bursting with flavor unmatched by anything sold on a grocery store shelf.
I've been on the hunt for the perfect strawberry summer candle since then.
I'm a sucker for anything wrapped in a gingham print; gingham to me, says yes, we understand. You want to recapture some sort of farm fresh experience that connected you to strawberries. We had it too, and we've made it and wrapped it in this gingham package for you so you can go back to Illinois for a moment and be 4 years old, running barefoot in the squinchy soil and eating hot strawberries from the bushes. This year I came close! A strawberry-rhubarb candle wrapped in gingham and with a galvanized metal lid put me right back into my childhood garden, and caught up in the fit of nostalgia that followed, I made strawberry jam.
It came close, but the random recipe I pulled from the internet was not my mom's recipe. It lacked the delicious tart-sweet balance that brought out the ripe flavor of the summer fresh strawberries. What it *did* do though was fill my kitchen with the fragrance of hot, cooking strawberries. It's like fresh cut grass, that smell--pungent, unmistakable, evocative, and so absent from daily life. We fill our lives with scented perfumes and fabric softeners and toilet bowl cleaners, but somehow, like the flavors of good, fresh, amazing whole foods, we have deprived ourselves of real scents--of growing things, of roasting things, of cooking things; of bubbling soups and sauces, of fresh baked tarts and just mowed grass, marigolds and geraniums hot in the sun. I hungered for real, memory-evocative scents.
Out in the garden I became hyper aware of the smells of growing things. My dwarf lemon trees are sadly and rather pathetically fruitless but they bloom like perfumiers for Old Hollywood; the slender white blossoms exude a honey-scented cloud that seduces bees and butterflies and anyone lucky enough to pass within four feet of their bombshell blooms. The tomato patch kicks up a sexy, spicy, warm ambrosia every time anyone, even the wind, brushes against their rustling leaves. Even the soil itself has a satisfying warm smell as the decaying leaves and compost molder into fattening nutrients for the plants they envelop.
Bitten with the desire for true smells I roasted peanuts in the oven. Their warm, salty, roasty, delicious scent, a thousand times more potent than a jar of Jif, filled not just my nostrils but my mouth with the taste and smell of the best parts of childhood--peanut butter, eaten by the spoonful fresh out of the jar, peanut butter cookies, warm and chunky and soft, peanuts roasting in their shells at carts on the street corners or in bags at the circus and baseball games. I made fresh bread, and though it was an absolute disaster (I just can't master yeast. Or baking. It's the whole, like, have to follow directions specifically and explicitly when I'm really more of a do-it-myself and curse myself for the products of my own stupid mistakes kind of girl) it smelled amazing, yeasty like morning inside a bakery; like the streets outside the Paris cafes, perfumed with baguettes and pain au chocolat. In the garage the smell of fresh-cut cedar and sawdust and pine shavings rose up proudly, the smells that made the neatly mitered chicken coop out of bare planks and galvanized screws, as strong as the whine of the power saw and drill, the lingering scent of making things.
I'd forgotten these kinds of smells. Some of them I'd never smelled before. And if scent is the sense most tied to memory, this year summer farming in heels constructed a far more richly complex memory movie-reel than any air freshener could ever hold a candle to.
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