Pubs, Sultry Summer Edition

The Summer 2013 issue of The Massachusetts Review, which includes my story “Plenty” is out and on the metaphorical stands.  You can subscribe here.

“Plenty” might be suitable for the season, which around here, we just call  “Thick of Farmer’s Market” (we also call it steamy-hot):

All those years ago, when the guy with the guitar at the blueberry farm had handed back her change, his fingers had been stained up to the first knuckle with blueberry juice. And then, on the drive home, she and John had had their first real argument — over how easy or hard it might be, to defer one’s student loans, or wear faded overalls, or be a gentleman farmer.

The next morning, she had cooked down the berries while John was at work, with a recipe she’d kept when she cleaned out her grandmother’s house, spidery handwriting on a stained index card.  She tilted it on the counter and set to work.  Eva’s Blueberry Jam,  it proclaimed, and in the right-hand margin: the best Edward says he ever tasted!  Who was Eva?  Edward?  The house filled up with the smell of hot sugar, like a fairground.

An aside:  last weekend’s Blackberry-Lime Jam  was just made for research’s sake, of course.

And while we’re on the subject of art and craft, and magazines, when my poem “Cucumbers” was published in Ruminate this past spring, I received a year’s subscription to it.  I just got the Summer 2013 issue.

It’s gorgeous, both in form and content.

Print, in case you haven’t heard, is pretty close to dead.  Who needs ink, when we’ve got bits and bytes and vapor?  The wisps of words we have do the job just fine.

I’d argue otherwise. I’d like to, in fact, put in a vote for things that are tactile — for  process.

I won’t lie:  I love the convenient jolt I get whenever I click away from the work I’m doing to read… whatever.  (To be honest, usually it’s the neighborhood listserv, which no one in their right mind would call either  art or craft).  I can waste an hour or so letting my mouse rove from here to there and back again with the best of them.

It’s so easy, for us to consume.  Words and opinions, in this particular case.  We eat them up.  We chew them up and spit them out.  And we hardly ever even have to pay for them! When we have gotten so good at attaching ourselves to the I.V. of communication,  what point is there in something as old-fashioned as print and paper?

But there might be something to be said — for the shrink-wrapped magazine that arrives unexpectedly on a sultry summer afternoon.  For one thing, its arrival in the mailbox helps keep the U.S. Postal Service afloat.   For another, the unpredictability of its arrival might actually be a sort  of gift.

We can summon up so much, and so quickly!  We get exactly what we want.  The second that we want it.

So maybe it’s good for us  — to occasionally be surprised.  Even if it’s by something as mundane as a magazine.

The day my copy of the latest Ruminate arrived, I stood at the curb and reached into my mailbox.  The neighbor’s hickory tree has already started tossing down a few harbinger nuts, hints of cooler weather to come.  The street was quiet, quiet.  Sealed off.  I tossed the mail onto  the front seat of the car and backed out of the driveway and Younger Girleen and I headed off, to the orthodontist.

This time last week, she and I were headed farther afield.  To Western NC to pick up her older sister at camp.

On the way we stopped, as we have the past couple of years, to pick berries at a  farm perched at the top of a slant-sided hill. South Carolina tableland, I suppose you’d call the area, the littlest toe of the foothills of the Blue Ridge.  The real hills, or their bulky outlines, hang on the horizon like a bank of clouds.  We pick a gallon of blackberries from looping canes; another of  rabbit-eye Blues.

And then I lug them into our hotel room that night, and out again the next morning.  After Big Sister has been picked up, and hugged, and we are headed homeward, we discuss:  a crumble this year?  A pie?  Should we just eat them by the handful?

There was enough for all those things.  There was, in fact, plenty.  

Last Sunday afternoon, I brought glass jars to a boil in a black-speckled canner purchased at the local hardware store that, a year or so after the Big Box went in two miles away, gave up the ghost and went under.

Thinking all the while.  Of this, of that, of the way an 11-year-old’s legs magically lengthen when you aren’t there to see that 11-year-old for two weeks.

Thinking also of the water required to sterilize a half-dozen jelly jars, the natural gas required to heat it, and the jar of jelly to be had at Kroger down the street.  What does it cost?  Two, three dollars?

I am a fool.

Every morning when we pull out  our newly-minted jam and smear it onto slabs of toast, I admire its distillation of that afternoon, when I picked berries with my eight-year-old, and a hawk wheeled overhead, and I was lost in process.  

Our fingers touched every single berry in this jam!  Younger Girleen points out.

At the orthodontist, I sat in the waiting area while her titanium spring dental appliance was adjusted, magazine on lap. Fingers happy with the heft of the paper pages, the crisp ink, the middle section of reproduced paintings by an artist I’d never before known to seek out.

A fool, yes, but such a happy one, on certain sultry summer days.