Attention, Citizens: I made jam.
I can haz bucket
Because that’s what you do, when you have three buckets of fresh-picked strawberries and no way to transport them from Georgia to Texas: you learn to make jam. You spend a good 45 minutes tromping through Wal-Mart in search of a substitute for a canning rack, and you invest in jars and a $6 canning tools set, and you heat up the jars and make jam.
But, if you’re a blogger, you also think about how to document it. This would be great for Pinterest. It’s too bad all you have is a crummy camera phone, but perhaps if we angle the lens just so, the picture will be suitably Pinnable.
And then there’s the question of whether this third in a series of “I accomplished something!” posts is really a little bit disingenuous, given how very many things go unaccomplished each day. Maybe the narrative should be framed in terms of “despite my ineptitude, I didn’t spread botulism!” instead of “hey, look! I made something!” There’s already a substantial segment of the population whose initial reaction will be “why didn’t you just buy jam while you were at Wal-Mart?”
I had an article saved in my “Drafts” folder for months – one of countless opinion pieces on the rise of the DIY movement, with a whole cottage industry of industrious cottage-dwellers sewing curtains from pillowcases, making headboards from cabinet doors, and solving organizational problems with Mason jars. I can’t find the article now, but you get the drift. Now we can’t just have chocolate frosted cupcakes for the class; we need to have themed cake pop bouquets. We can’t buy peasant skirts off the rack; we have to make them from scraps like peasants do. It’s all about being more authentic.
Which is how I end up full of malaise on a sunny afternoon in a strawberry field, wondering if I could be accused of:
- play-acting the part of the migrant workers who harvest the fruit for my jam the other 364 days of the year
- taking jobs from American workers by paying money for the privilege of picking my own strawberries
- going to great lengths to capture an authentic food experience when the more authentic representation of my life is the buying of rotisserie chickens and Del Monte green beans on sale
- elevating domestic tasks to a sacramental level by fetishizing them via the creation of virtual shrines to my own self-abasement as home-maker, a term coined by the patriarchy to distract me from the true value of my labor (I would have made a terrific grad student.)
See, now, the value of blogging? It opens the mind to every possible overanalysis of the simplest of actions.
I love this blog, really I do. I can never manage to keep a diary – it just turns into this churning burble of emotion that leaves me thinking, “WOMAN. Get ahold of yourself.” But I love being able to come back to events from my life years ago that I’d forgotten all about and relive them for a moment. I have a maudlin obsession with the passage of time that causes me to become wistful with every photo I snap.
I suppose my overall point is: if ever I find myself documenting an activity – or, worse, participating in an activity – just for the blog of it? That is the day I will quit.
(Yes, I realize this is a strange post from a person who just said “COME LISTEN TO ME TALK ABOUT HOW TO SHARE YOUR BLOG CONTENT WITH THE WORLD!“)
Arwen Mosher wrote a reflection on choosing the tasks that bring you joy that has really stayed with me:
Here’s how I see it now: we all have the same basic responsibility to provide for our families and to care for them. Feeding them, clothing them, keeping them safe, and giving them the love and attention they deserve are non-negotiables. Everything else is extra.
In a perfect world, I’d be able to do everything. In five minutes I could make a list of fifty tasks I’d like to conquer regularly, and that would barely scratch the surface. But my resources are finite, so I have to choose.
So choose I do: to bake the bread, to tidy the toys, to manage a few other “extras” which are important to me.
No sane mother of many little ones would bake her own bread. But this one loves getting her hands in that dough, loves seeing her children’s glee when she gives them warm buttered slices, loves watching her husband perk up when he walks in the door and spots a fresh loaf on the counter.
Bread is my soul-soothing extra. What’s yours?
And that’s how I feel about my little pint jars of jam, or the massive sewing projects I take on every couple of years – they’re “extra,” but they bring me joy. My problem is probably that I tend to ignore the nuts and bolts of everyday homemaking in favor of the larger construction projects that make me happy. Which is why I’m currently smitten with Pinterest.
But if it becomes about Keeping Up with the Jonses, handmade-whatsit-wise, then that brings nobody joy. If I’m shooing away my children from the mixer so I can make the PERFECT lemon banana chicory brownie pinwheels, it would be better to slice up some premade cookie dough and call it a day.
So – what do you like to make by hand, even if you could just buy it cheaper at Wal-Mart? Possible answers include “dinner reservations.”
Half the time when we get together for family dinners, my mom is yelling “NOBODY EAT UNTILL WE TAKE PICTURES.”
We mutinied.
It;s fun the first couple times and it makes nice Internet, but after awhile it’s just too darn much to keep up with.
True fact: that last nice pic of a quilt? Totally tossed over a pile of laundry. At least it was clean laundry..
As for the question – I like to make homemade pizza. beats the frozen stuff every day. (and yes I’m thinking why did i take pics last time???)
Ooh, I like to make homemade pizza, too. I am toying with the idea of a “Paleo summer” so maybe I should go out in a blaze of pizza-consuming glory before I quit the carbs.
I really like the phrase “makes nice Internet,” and will choose to believe that you coined it.
…and once you get into your Paleo summer, I’ve got some grain-free pizza crusts I’ve bookmarked.
Well, i always make our own jam. We don’t eat a lot of it, so a couple batches of freezer jam lasts a year. And I make all my nice dresses, since I can’t ever find anything that fits me without extensive alterations. And if I’m going to extensively alter a garment, I might as well make it myself in the first place.
A lot of my problem is that I know exactly what I want somethng to look like… I just usually don’t know what that is until I see it. Sometime sit works the other direction and I fall in love with something that I haven’t quite figured out where it fits. My brain is an interesting place. But my house is a mess.
I’m going to try low-sugar jam next time. This basic recipe is very, very sweet. I was going to just reduce the amount of sugar but apparently you have to use low-sugar pectin.
Yes you definitely need the low sugar pectin, even careless sugar measurement can cause setting issues. Sure-Gel makes some special pectins for this, but I’ve never tried them.
I haven’t really canned since I was little, most of my food preservation is done via freezing.
I really dig this post, Dorian. That is all.
Right back atcha, Penty baby. (obscure Magnum P.I. reference)
“My problem is probably that I tend to ignore the nuts and bolts of everyday homemaking in favor of the larger construction projects that make me happy.”
Me, too! *jumps up and down – kinda*
My joy thing is designing digital scrapbooking stuffs. It makes me happy.
I feel like I fit the profile of a digital scrapbooker but I’ve never really tried it. I have an entire cabinet full of scrapbook paper, etc., and I am slowly parceling it out to my daughter. I do wish I would find the time to do something with all of our photos besides upload them to Flickr.
LOL – don’t beat yourself up about how you don’t do this OTHER domestic thing that you really wish you would. Sharing/storing photos on Flickr is perfect. As for all that leftover scrapbook paper, maybe your daughter would like to do projects with them? My store has a sister site with hybrid tutorials: http://www.thehybridchick.com/. Oh, and then there’s always Pinterest.
(Hopefully we are familiar enough with each other that you know that link is not a plug in any way…)
If I had made botulism-free strawberry jam, you’d better believe I’d be shouting it from the rooftops, taking out a full page ad in the New York Times, and/or the online equivalent. I’ve always had the need to make *something* (at times *anything*) by hand to keep sane. When my girls were young, we always made their Halloween costumes, and held themed birthday parties at home. I’ve also done my share of making clothes, hair bows, Christmas decorations, painted furniture, etc. We had several books of fantastic craft projects/activites to do with children, and we had a blast with that. Now that the girls are gone, I’ve turned to bread-baking (until I went grain-free!), icon painting, and book-making. I’m pretty much challenged in the home-making department, but hope springs eternal that I’ll strike the appropriate balance some day.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot…I have this odd dichotomy where I actually do think a lot of the homemaker mythos is a patriarchal ploy, and yet I love love love making homemade pies. Especially the crust, although this may partially be about my weird delight in eating raw pie dough.
Anyway, for me personally, it doesn’t come down to the joy as much as the value. When I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror and think “really, apron -lady? Could you be more twee?” I ask myself why I’m doing this—and for me, it’s because pie, or the risotto, or whatever is delicious and makes people happy, and not only does the homemade taste better, but it allows me to bypass a large part of the food industry, about which I have real ethical/philosophical/health concerns.
So for me, the pinterest fad has kind of been annoying–it distracts me from the real human value in homemakey things I do–the legitimate feeding and managing and small-scale aesthetics–and makes them into this cutesy little girl rich white female bonding game. But, patriarchal ploy or not, it’s a great place to find recipes.
Sometimes I think the sole purpose of a liberal arts education is to enable a person to criticize her own decisions from as wide a variety of schools of thought as possible.
I would love to know how to make a proper pie crust and a proper pie filling, as mine always comes out like soup. I say this based on trying the same apple pie recipe twice and never branching out further.
I love your perspective on living for the sake of your blog. I haven’t crossed that line. Yet.
“Living for the sake of the blog.” Why couldn’t I have put it that way? Coulda saved me a whole post. “I’m never going to live for the sake of my blog.” That.
“Sometimes I think the sole purpose of a liberal arts education is to enable a person to criticize her own decisions from as wide a variety of schools of thought as possible. ”
Ha! Yes.
And what do I truly like to make that I could just as easily buy? Short answer: poems. A novel, if I could only focus for long enough.
Longer answer: I like gardening even though I’ve never managed to maintain a garden that actually maintained *us* in any real way. I’m totally a hobby homesteader, and a very selective one who does not sew, does not quilt, does not bake (any more, since we went low-carb, though I do make pizza for the kids, because I’m too lazy to go to the store when they decide they want pizza), does not can, etc etc etc. I just like looking at the back yard and plotting where else I might put more blueberry bushes.
But in general, I’m not a DIY kind of girl. Though I think this is a whole different question from whether or not one is a “homemaker,” as in patriarchal ploy. There’s no doubt that I am that: I’m the one who cares that the house is not only clean, but pretty, because I have to live here. I just don’t make curtains (having spent several Thursday nights with my daughter’s American Heritage Girls troop helping them make aprons, I could wax totally lyrical on my hatred of sewing. I had kind of forgotten it, but now I remember. Ergh.). I cook daily from scratch, because I like to do that, but beyond that I draw the line. There is only so much time.
I think things like Pinterest, which I don’t have, contribute to this sense of competition among women — the same sense of competition that used to drive little groups of homeroom mothers to unbelievable heights on snack day. Now the whole world gets to be a homeroom mother. Blogs of course *can* do this, too, depending on what you read. The nice thing about blogs is that they don’t *have* to be image-oriented (as in lots of pictures, and as in the other sense of “image,” too, I guess), though pictures do drive up traffic, which is telling. People don’t flock to . . . I don’t know . . . conversations about Edwin O’Connor . . . in quite the same numbers.
Really enjoyed this comment. The thing about Pinterest – which I do enjoy – is that it lends itself to “how-to” and “check this out” posts, not long-form essays, stories, POEMS, etc. It is a huge source of traffic for many sites but you are right about the nature of the conversations it facilitates.