Day 97
Soliloquy for My Wife
Jalapeño Jelly
It’s trash day. I girdle myself to open the refrigerator doors. No, nothing moldy. That I got rid of as soon as I saw it. That was the easy part. It’s all of the canning jars with your handwriting on the lids. All of those jars that you had canned and opened and put in the fridge. Six or seven months ago now. The oven roasted tomatoes, the porcini peppers, the pickled beets, the pickled red onions, the peach marmalade. The other food stuff you had meal plans for, long since expired dates now. Breakfast, lunch, and dinners, crafted with your ingenuity and passion, the ingredients of your love that you, to the last day, cooked for me. That last meal as I ate and watched you not touch your food, I knew something was wrong.
And indeed there was, but you would admonish me now for waiting this long to clean it all out. Well forgive me my dear, I was never as practical as you. It was only today did I have enough courage to wash it all down the drain. The grinding whirring of the disposal nearly wrecking me, the sound a discordant thrum tearing at my heart. Is that how it goes now, to gather enough strength to not collapse as I watch it disappear, each fragment of it touched by your hand, the cutting, slicing, and dicing, the canning jars cooling on the counter. All of the images caught, frozen in my memory now.
There was the one jar though, it was there at the back, hidden, tucked back in behind the others. The jalapeño jelly. Now that, that will keep until I eat it all, to the very last bit, the hot sweet spice, that will linger on my tongue and I will think of us picking the peppers, the best harvest ever, all of your other jars given away to friends and family that coveted it, from season to season. But I have the last one to savor.
When the last of it is gone I’ll wipe away the tears, and remember you and I sitting in the sun while we talked and chatted the nonsense of old lovers.
S-
