It snowed a foot last night. This morning we made eggs and bacon and coffee and toast and I opened one of the jars of jam my aunt gave me for Christmas. It’s made of blackberries from the family farm in rural Indiana. My relatives, they don’t really mess around when it comes to farming.
My cousin trains and drives his own oxen. They make their own tools and build houses and grow most of their own food. When I was in high school, when all the other hoodlums got to road trip to Daytona beach to drink Miller Light until they barfed out a second story window, I was at my aunt and uncle’s farm castrating goats and gutting bluegill. I liked it. It was spring and the grass was getting tall and lots of fish biting and flipping all rainbowy and sticky and lots of little sheep and goats and kittens being born.
This last Christmas, my aunt and uncle and cousins made a package covered in a collage of roses and filled it with jams and green beans and pickled stuff and roasted garlic. I’ve been eating them slowly so they last longer. My older sister also got a beautifully decorated package from them. She has dietary restrictions, so when she saw me open my gift, she assumed she got a similar thing and put the package under the tree.
It turns out that my aunt knew about Emmy’s dietary restrictions, so instead of putting in jams and pickled things, she gave Em a butchered chicken. But no one knew there was a dead farm chicken in the package. We thought it was jelly. Auntie thought we'd open them all right away, but that was not the case, and she had gone home. The package could’ve stayed under the Christmas tree for days. Luckily, we figured out what it was before the cat did, and the headless Christmas chicken was still mostly frozen.
The jam was good. I’m glad I got jam. More than that, I'm glad I'm realated to my family. They live very sustainably, and are gentle to the Earth.
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