Preserves

by Max Christian Hansen

On my last drive cross-country
I stopped and stayed with my grandparents
in their house on the lake.
A pond, really, and, now my memory’s jogged, it wasn’t
my last trip at all, but only the last one when they lived in that house.

They call it a lake, though I can toss a stone across it without much strain.
The house, now, that was really a house,
though it was scarcely bigger than
the tiny apartment they moved to next.
It had a basement—that was part of what made it a house. Dug below
the level of the lake, it had a sempiternal smell of wet, a touch
of mold in it. And yet down there they kept a bedroom of sorts,
plain and dark, for guests like me.

You reached it through a little passage lined with shelves, and here
there were some jars of the preserves she, Grandma, was still making that year.
Oh, she would make a few in those few years after,
just as she still made pies for market,
sold them to tourists like me from California and
maybe some odder places, but it was Grandpa really
who made them, while she sat and guided his every move with
Add some pectin and
Bit more sugar and
Cut it fine and
Landsakes and
Gossip about the crones they knew.

I went to bed in that dark, that damp, and dreamed
of a barn, a big, a cathedral-big barn, done up for a feast.
and in it broad high windows, and there was me
on a ladder in one of them, fitting with jars of preserves
a stained-glass monument to her, to her who was sliding toward
that day our feast would be her farewell.

I left two windows open full, and filled with jars
one only, in the middle.
And now, if there was anything represented in my picture,
I don’t remember it, and maybe didn’t even that morning when I woke.
Did I draw birds, or saints, or was I, as I now believe,
so rapt and captured by the colors flooding though the fruited pane
that I joyed in color alone, and made a crazy quilt?

It doesn’t matter. Nor does it matter how my own mother
in Grandma’s last years let flow some bit of bitterness, a touch of pique
at the old woman, about, as she let on,
Grandma’s increasing old-age cussedness, but I knew better, heard
the echoes of some early years of chill and dark and barns
not bursting nor larders nor lives as full as they might have been.

When Mom complains I never ask what happened or didn’t
in those early years. But I see Grandpa,
patient as all eternity, cutting away each seed or bit of hull,
each thing that would mar the flavor or lessen the
burst and pop of color when you held the jar to the light.

Only it matters that Mom knew there were flaws in
the old woman I revered. So there are flaws in me, nor any need
to lie about them, only to hope that, just as I cut
and toss away each bit of dark
my mother spread on my times, I may yet,
through someone’s patience be
not a saint, but lightsome,
preserved for you.