Seeking Marmalade

 Everything in my little galley kitchen holds a miasma of stickiness.

Marmalade seems to be my antidote to pain. I had turned to it during the Brett Kavanaugh hearings and found it was an antidote. Its mechanical processes and the focus demanded by vigilant stirring blotted away emotions that conclusively proved I wasn’t numb to modern horror. And now after months of being numb, the slaughter of children at Mass on the first day of school gave me that same proof, with nausea and wordless paralysis. When I began to think again, I remembered the power of marmalade.

Tomato bushes in the yard next door drooped over the fence, giving me access to their fruit. This year, in spite of the weeks of daily sunlight, the tomatoes fattened but remained a stubborn green. I looked up green tomato marmalade, not at all certain if such a thing existed. When I learned that yes it did indeed, with a bounty of recipes asserting its presence, I chose one of them..

My choice was based on the scant number of ingredients needed to turn the tomatoes into preserves. I live in a peculiar form of food desert, where fruits, vegetables, and fish are sold in stalls at exorbitant prices. Food that transgresses those categories is available at an abbreviated version of H Mart, a couple of upscale convenience stores, and the ground floor of a City Target which is a cruel parody of a supermarket.

All I needed were lemons, ginger, and sugar and those were easy to come by. I picked tomatoes that evening and admired the still life that they brought to my kitchen counter when placed beside the lemons. The next morning I began to chop and squeeze.

The smell of lemon juice filled my little apartment and I began to feel I hadn’t bought enough ginger because its scent failed to assert itself against the citrus. The tomatoes seemed to have lost their fragrance overnight but they provided the color, which swiftly faded when I put the mixture on the stove.

My stove is electric which means heat control is a capricious matter. The mass of tomatoes, lemon juice, and ginger was, the recipe told me, prone to the hazards of sticking and needed to be stirred. I brewed some ginger tea, just in case more liquid was required, and stirred at regular intervals for an hour. The mixture darkened and the tomatoes began to dissolve. Clearly they lacked the stamina that oranges provided and I began to wish I’d added chunks of the lemons.

Instead I added the sugar, six cups of it. This seemed excessive but what do I know? I only use it during times of crisis. I mixed it until it dissolved and watched the contents of the pot double in bulk. A cold saucer waited in my freezer for the moment when this all turned “jammy.” What the hell was jammy?

The sugar provided the threat of scorching and after this much labor and attention, I wasn’t going to let that happen. Tending the pot as if it were a sick baby, I stirred and stirred, like one of the three witches in Macbeth. 

The mixture turned into a weird shade of brown that looked far from jammy to my inexperienced eye and it took much too long to thicken. Twiddling with the knob that controlled the heat, I aimed for the rapid simmer that the recipe mandated. Every so often I put a spoonful on the chilled plate, hoping it wouldn’t run. It stayed depressingly active and I continued to stir. By the time that it showed signs of coagulation, my wrist had begun to hurt.

What resulted was far from being marmalade. It was the thickest,sweetest fruit spread that I’d ever had the misfortune of tasting. There was no flavor except sugar, there was no texture, and it was brown. 

I spooned it into a bowl and gave it to the man who had planted the tomatoes. Later he told me he’d given it to a friend who had a high tolerance for glucose. 

But the marmalade, as flawed as it was, did its job. After hours of focus upon it, I came back into the world, my nerve ends recoated with numbness. It had given me space to absorb what seemed unbearable, still painful but not overwhelming. Better than fentanyl, I suppose, and much more accessible. I’m grateful for that.

Desert Lessons

 I fell asleep as soon as I was alone in Tucson, wrapped in graceful comfort. Tired from too little sleep the night before and dazed by changing universes in less than three hours, I woke to the sound of thunder and immediately rushed up to the rooftop terrace. The electric smell that had filled the air when I had walked through a paved desert had vanished, replaced by fat raindrops and a strong breeze. 

I leaned on the low wall that serves as a parapet and felt warm rain on my skin, dampening my hair, a benediction and a sacrament in this dry country.

Surrounded by mountains,jagged thugs on one side, glamorous peaks on another, with ghostly ranges to the east and the south that hinted at the Mexican border, I stared at the black-trunked mesquite trees as their leaves brightened in the rain and felt the nourishment that’s unique to Tucson. This landscape calms me and I hunger for it when I’m in lush, brightly colored places. Steeped in that peculiar peace, I think of Saint Jerome and wonder if there were any female desert mystics.

I may have found one when I made my pilgrimage to the Etherton Gallery which was filled with the photographs of a woman who had been formed within the Australian desert and found a similar home in Tucson. “Landscape shapes us,” she said, and she embraces it in her art: the mystery of desert trees, the shadowed shapes of living objects within the sand, and its clouds. An entire wall was filled with her photographs of clouds and I stood in wonder. 

I’ve never walked in Tucson without catching clouds with my phone camera and there they all were, solitary in a scrap of sky, boiling in the magnificence of an approaching storm, peony-petaled in the gold of a sunset. 

Usually I walk through this gallery the way I do in a museum, with a devoted appreciation and no longing, but I wanted one of those photographs with all of my heart. Many of them would fit in a corner of my backpack with room to spare and all of them had prices that were slight enough to make only a tiny dent in a credit card. But they all belonged together,a glorious obsession, and I knew that buying only one would diminish their power. 

When I walked out into the heated air, the sky had turned pale, rumbles of thunder were muted by distance, and my longing for rainfall surprised me. On all of my other trips I had walked without effort to places I wanted to see but this time the heaviness of the sunlight sapped not only my energy but my impetus too. My list of destinations shrank after a couple of miles, dissolving under a thick blanket of weighted heat. 

Eight years ago I’d ignored the heat and humidity of late July in New York, propelled by my personal myth, Age Doesn’t Matter. This year Tucson slapped me hard and told me, “Yes bitch. It does.” Ignoring that and pushing past it cut into reserves that demanded replenishment and I spent more time indoors than I wanted. On my last night I was in bed before seven and now, back at home, my body yearns for a nap. I hate naps, and I’m trying not to hate the monsoon that has pushed me into them. 

When I return to Tucson in a few more weeks, the air will be light and arid. The heat won’t fall like an anvil and I’ll move with purpose that won’t falter. But now I know. This is a privilege that will not last and I’m coming close to a different way of being in the world.