GROWING UP
Memories are made of this: fruit grown, picked and eaten with love.
APPLES My cousins were only allowed to give bruised apples to the horses. We spent afternoons dropping apples on the kitchen floor, waiting for them to soften.
APRICOTS This is the recipe for stewed apricots: halve the apricots you have picked and put them in a stock pot with as much sugar as you want: maybe a cup, maybe two. Cook until the apricots are swimming in their juice and the sugar has dissolved. Depending on your harvest, you can ladle it into blue 2 litre ice-cream containers and put it in the deep freeze to make sure you have stewed apricots all year round. I made stewed apricots this summer, with 10 kilos of apricots I bought at my innercity suburb’s farmers’ market. I spent an afternoon in a friend’s kitchen, stirring the apricots until they oozed deep orange. I burnt my fingertips dipping them into the juice as it boiled. It almost tasted the same. My mother and I make stewed apricots, but Grandma was famous for apricot jam. The apricot tree in her backyard was immense, stretching out across the garden shed and the woodshed. The last year she made jam, she had us get up on top of the woodshed to pick as many apricots as we could reach. The woodshed was rickety, riddled with termite damage, and the corrugated iron rusty, peeling and searing hot.
Below, in her housedress, Grandma watched with her hands shielding her eyes from the sun, occasionally pointing at an apricot she wanted us to pick. That last batch of apricot jam set in the pantry on the top shelf where no-one would disturb it when looking for biscuits.
BLACKBERRIES Once we made a blackberry pie and took a thick slice wrapped in baking paper down to our Pa. He ate the pie with us sitting on the floor around his chair and asked where we got the blackberries from. We told him, down in the bottom gully where the bushes cling to the rocky wall. He said, ‘There were never blackberries down there in my day.’ We were all a bit sunburnt from the picking blackberries, all a bit scratched from reaching too far into the bushes, all a bit stung from mozzies that lingered in the puddles at the bottom of the gully. The snake bandage was still tucked in my back pocket, just in case, as was the note that we had taped to the front door that said, ‘Gone picking berries at 11am.’ The bath was still streaked with dirt from where we had lined up to wash our legs and the kitchen was still a mess of flour. Our fingers were stained, but the pie was once-in-a-lifetime good. Years after Pa ate the slice of pie, our uncle sprayed the blackberries and we couldn’t pick any that summer. But the year after that the blackberries
were back and a fox made its den somewhere deep in the bushes. We could smell it when we checked to see if the berries were ripe.
CUMQUATS There is a single cumquat growing stubbornly on the cumquat tree two doors down from my apartment. I noticed it a week ago—I can’t figure out if it’s an extremely late cumquat or an exceedingly early one. There is a man working from the front room of the house and I don’t want him to see me stealing his only cumquat. The cumquat tree that grew out of the front porch of my grandparent’s red-brick house was always fully grown, even when I was small. It was laden with fruit. I don’t know why it was planted—only one person from church ever dropped in to pick cumquats to make marmalade. We watched her from the lounge room, mad that she was taking our cumquats. We claimed the cumquat tree as our own. The sole purpose of the tree was to entertain us. When our aunts and mother sat at the kitchen table drinking tea, we stood on the front porch lobbing cumquats over the front fence and down the driveway. Over and over. We would sit in a circle under the shade of the tree, peeling cumquats and eating them segment by segment. Our eyes would water and we’d gasp. When we convinced the little cousins to try them, they would cry at the
