Abundance: Learning to See What's Already There

This year the mulberry tree in my backyard hangs heavy with abundance, branches so low to the ground they look as though they may break. It is as if she is offering her overly full arms to us, saying, “Here, have some.” When Lily and I gather the sweetness, half of every handful doesn’t make it to the bowl. There is a subtle scent of rot from all the berries that fall to the ground, softly thudding.

This year’s berries made me think about abundance. When we talk about abundance, we’re usually talking about money. But this bounty made me see: this is abundance right here in my backyard.

There’s a moment I have that feels Grinchy to me. It’s the moment where I scheme about how to get the maximum number of berries, as many as I can, maybe all the berries. Then I snap out of it and realize that it’s so much abundance we couldn’t possibly use up all of these berries, even if we managed to capture them all. More than that, she feeds an entire ecosystem. One pluck from a generous branch brings down a cascade of berries which feeds our neighbors—raccoons, squirrels, birds, dogs, coyotes and foxes that roam our neighborhood.

My grandmother Charline was an avid gardener. Maybe it was because I was a kid and everything looked bigger, but in my mind’s eye, her quarter of an acre garden was gigantic and wild, but it was well tended and produced so much food that she canned every year. I doubt she ever had to buy vegetables.

Somehow we always managed to go visit her in Coventry, Connecticut, just when the sugar snap peas were ready. I’d pull them off and eat them off the vine, carefully splitting the hull and pulling out the peas one by one. Once we had a family reunion, and her sisters came down from up north. Grandma pulled all of the sugar snap peas and her and her two sisters sat and shucked those peas, talking softly to one another in French in the dialect they brought from Canada.

My parents weren’t gardeners; we were the typical suburban family in the 90s. Both of them worked full time, both of them had moved far away from what their mothers did. If they could, they’d probably both protest if I told you they didn’t seem like huge fans of vegetables when I was growing up. So they didn’t keep a garden, or many plants. They never canned. In contrast, wandering in Grandma’s basement in Coventry was like wandering in a grocery story just for her. Jars and jars and jars of preserved foods. When she died, she had so many left over. That’s how prolific her abundance was, though she was not rich.

We don’t think about food as abundance anymore. We take it for granted. We have foods from all over the world carted to our grocery stores, or even straight to our homes, day and night. This is abundance, but it’s also a strange abundance, one that makes us blind. We stop seeing it that way when we never experience its opposite. If the mulberry tree produced year round, we wouldn’t go running with excitement out the backdoor to gather the first ripe berries.

Few people keep a well stocked pantry that would last them longer than a few weeks the way my grandmother did. Our ancestors did not live that way. And by ancestors, I’m talking only two generations back. They preserved today’s abundance for tomorrow’s meal… or tomorrow’s lack.

I’ll admit that as a kid I never really got what my grandmother was doing. Why not just go to the store? Why go to the process of doing all this? But I think my grandmother understood that the best food came from what you grew on your own land, from your own hands, from the rain that touched your garden.

Lily and I took all those berries and made mulberry jam. I’ve never made any kind of jam before, let alone gone through the process of preserving it so it will last. I’m a good cook, but for some reason the process of canning and preserving intimidates me. If I screw it up, will we all die of botchulism? I thought of Grandma while we processed the berries, ladled the jam into jars, then boiled them. The satisfying “pop” from the lids of my jars as they cooled on the counter made me think that maybe Grandma was looking over my shoulder, making sure I got it done right. It was a lot of work, but strangely satisfying to look at those six jars and think about some glum morning in the dead of winter, when I would open that jar and taste the sun and the rain and the sweet of this spring.