There’s so much I want to tell you before the winter ends. Come closer please, if you’re curious. Come into my kitchen, have a seat at the table. Before the light tilts and the days turn to when I won’t know when to rest. Come up before our roads melt into impassible mud when the rivers thaw, the creeks flood.
This all feels urgent to me as I’ve been in silences for a while now.
This is about orange.
The color of the stocking cap I wear in the woods so I don’t get shot by a hunter, which is also a beacon, should I get lost.
It is the color of standing still and listening to the ravens’ caw against the backdrop of a stain glass sunrise. Fuchsias, magentas, lavenders, pinks. This winter orange is warming low light on blue cold snow seeking through that cathedral of trees as the dogs howl across the fields after a long night’s work guarding their flock.
I want to tell you about what orange smells like in my steamy kitchen when I make marmalades for the first time, as I have been doing and rather a lot. The intimacy of slicing the fruits, tending to the boiling waters + the sugars, these alchemies that transform whole citrus into sweet-sticky-bitter which is then jarred and at the ready for slathering over and between layers of cake. Toast, melted butter. A spoonful stirred into black coffee. Swirled into brownies, baked onto cookies. Triscuits.
Sharing desserts and marmalade with friends and neighbors is all well and good. I do love it. Having a slice of snacking cake midday feels luxurious. The glimmerings of piped buttercream and candied fruits bedecking these cakes is already underway. Yet my body tells me it’s the pectin I desire.
As I stood facing the stove one morning it struck me that every burner held elements cooking away, all meant for other-next things. Dried beans in one pot for a dinner braise. Leaves, berries, seaweeds and barks for herbal stocks, syrups, tonics, in another. A trotter for soup. The largest pot was filled with citrus cut through to the rinds, pith and seeds - similarly to what bones, cartilage and skin of an animal are, to making broth.
Now half-gallon jars blue-taped and labeled drinking pectin are dated and stored in our basement fridge. It’s a round and full and slightly bitter drink, which cuts well with water, hot or cold. This drink soothes my gut and my sense of thrift.
In the making of marmalade, it’s marvelous how bits and bobs of thick cut grapefruits, sour oranges and pomelo rinds suspend and how setting – that point when it all thickens into a situation where these translucents will do just as they want, once cooled. (Hopefully, this aligns with what the cook would like them to do, too.) And how this process can be a mediative, experiential act of patient, full body observation. The shifting viscosity of pectin and juice. The sound of a spatula as it runs whirlpools and shooting stars across a hot pan, stirred watchfully. The carousal cadence of bursting goggle-eyed sugar bubbles.
A coalescence happened when the just-right cookbook author/teacher Camilla Wynne crossed my path at the just-right time and my senses opened to this Alice in Wonderland world waiting for me in the kitchen. Cooking again opened up again, as a collective of creative wonderous practical daily loving gestures. Learning, as I am, by trusting someone else + my own senses. Like how she instructed an age-old test for setting by cooling a dab of hot gel on a frozen plate. No doubt there’s more scientific procedures for those who need to know. But I don’t because I like magic. Maybe more.
It seems to me like there’s no possible way to know - nor why would you want to know some absolute, the definitive equation or temperature - that’ll determine what the exact outcome will be when fruits, sugar, water and heat dance together? (Note: the science of canning food safely is another thing altogether and should not be trifled with.) When every time, with every fruit, in every turn on every stove in every weather, it’s new. A new creation which you get to feel, see and hear, smell in the moment, then taste. Then share. That’s the alchemy of it, the last knot in the yarn. Like this bit of writing which’ll transform into something beyond me once it’s released into the world. For you.
As our time comes to a close, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the orange I carried in my purse to my father’s memorial service. Bowing my head, tears flowing fingers dug into its rind, releasing its perfume as Aaron Copeland’s Fanfare for Common Man rose up, per his behest. I wonder if the musicians and audience sensed something orange in the church air? I’d like to think they did.
It was only a few months ago when I held onto a daily orange laying in a hospital bed recovering from surgery. In the cacophony of the acute care unit, the bustling nurses and doctors repairing my body – I hugged the orange my husband would bring in fresh. I breathed it in so deeply, praying that its elements would connect to my elements. That its oils and essences would awaken my blood and cells and chemistry, conveying messages to my healing alimentary tract so it would remember and want to be able to eat + poop once again.
This dear readers, is a longer part of my story + my scars but we’ve only just met so I’ll leave it at that for now.
I really just wanted to tell you about the color of my winter before this winter ends. Before our paths may melt away.
I wanted to tell you about the color orange.
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