Honoring Even the Toughest Seasons

My dad died four years ago, at the beginning of April. Easter and this time of year (March and April) have long been favorites of mine, so his deathiversary complicates a time I used to welcome with joy. I'm always a little depressed around this time of year, often expressed in stomach-flu-like symptoms (some of us grieve in our gag reflex, I guess), and I've been trying to deal with, celebrate, and honor this season with all its complications. This means enjoying the blooms of the season in our changing and expanding garden, preserving the bounty of the season with homemade jams, and keeping nature and seasonality in mind in my writing.

I've been enjoying the roses we adopted from our neighbors when they moved, though I'm still getting my head around maintaining roses. They're really lovely, and I love the broad sprinkle of rose petals across the walk and the grass when a bloom is finished.

To my eye, a perfect yellow rose. (Yes, I know I need to prune it....)

My mother-in-law has a blood orange tree in her backyard, and she always brings me a wonderful assortment of them. They have a tart, almost floral sweet taste, and I have really wanted to make marmalade from some of them. This year I finally did it, and I was careful to use a thermometer to get it to 215 degrees. Temperature is the key in marmalade, I'm finding, to give it that vaguely candied quality. I also added some rose water to emphasize the rose notes and preserve a sense of the season, and the roses in bloom outside.

The beginning stages of blood orange marmalade. I love the colors, from start to finish. They're like jewels.

My sister's neighbor apparently has a loquat tree, and they haven't been eating the loquats at all, so they elected to "rescue" them for their friendly family loquat-snarfing machine (yours truly). Since they rescued so many from the ground, I determined that I couldn't eat them all before they spoiled... so I made loquat jam, for our household and several others. Not enough Californians enjoy the loquats in their midst; too many have never even tried them before, don't know how to eat them, and have never had them preserved or baked either. Maybe I should start the Loquat Deliciousness Awareness Society... but then I probably wouldn't receive such a bounty of rescued loquats. Again, temperature is the key to this jam, along with some warm spices (cinnamon and vanilla, in my case), but beware... the skins are full of tannins, so if you ever process a huge quantity, wear gloves. Learn from my mistakes.

Loquat jam in that final, arduous crawl from 211 to 215 degrees. For some reason, those last four degrees take an eternity. I can now attest: this stuff tastes great with hard cheeses!