Memories in a Jar

One of the great delicacies of my childhood was my grandmother's watermelon rind pickles. We were young, my brother and I. The afternoon would grow late. We'd sit out on the screened-in porch that ran the long length of my grandparents' house. At one end, there was a door that led out to the front steps. A long clothesline ran to the woodshed. In the morning, the line was filled with damp sheets that turned crisp in the breeze. At the other end, the door opened to a dog line, beyond it, the garden, and then over a marsh to the lake. The porch was hot in the afternoon sun. We waited for my grandfather to come home from work. We waited for leftover cookies and thermosed tea still hot in his lunch pail. He spent his life farming. Retired from that life he drove dump trucks in the summer, snow plows in the winter. Finally, he would come. We would wait for the cookies, perched on the edge of the wicker furniture. My grandmother would come out from the house with a plateful of watermelon.

"Save the rinds," she would always say.

And we did. With the same fervor I imagine Patriot gardens were planted during World War II, we ate the juicy red pulp of the melon just until our teeth were about to hit the white of the rind. At the end of our afternoon tea, she would take them away, slice off our teeth marks, chop the rinds into bite-sized pieces and then bag them and put them in the freezer. It took a whole summer's worth of watermelon eating before there were enough rinds to pickle. They awaited their hot brine bath in the tiny freezer of an old ice box. It screamed of 1950 even when I was only 10 years old. It was grey and rounded - a jet stream turned refrigerator. To open it, you pulled down a stainless steel handle that would catch just before the door opened. No light came on inside. The stale smell of thirty years worth of stored food clung to its sides. A thin aluminum box served as the freezer. The refrigerator always housed the same inventory - a gallon of maple syrup, industrial-sized plastic jars that once held mayonnaise, but had since contained many other things, a case of beer left over from Labor Day that would most likely remain until the holiday rolled around again. Inside the ice box waited the frozen rinds. We felt we were doing an important job - eating that melon to get to those rinds.

I have countless memories of my grandmother at work in the kitchen. She had the magical ability to make every food taste great - even to a kid. Her cookies were always homemade. Jams and jellies never came from a store. Fish came from the lake. But it was not until last year when I was swept in my own wave of growing things and preserving things and eating locally and wasting less that I thought about those watermelon rind pickles - the too sweet, rubbery treats of my youth. And so I recruited my kids, trained them to eat the watermelon slice just so. I took the rinds to the kitchen, sliced off the teeth marks and chopped them into bite-sized pieces. The work was harder, more tedious than I had imagined, but satisfying to see the little green pieces, jumbled in a bag, sitting in the freezer. We ate watermelon steadily for a few weeks before I rummaged though a cardboard box of cookbooks for the Blue Ball Book of Canning.

I mixed the sugar, the vinegar, the spices and set the rinds to boil. I watched as they changed form - the bright, stiff green softening, losing color - taking on a warmer, deeper hue - softening around the edges, much as memories do. Something sweet from something that could so easily have been thrown away.