Carol tossed the jar underhand across the kitchen.
“Guess this one’s yours too, Linda.”
I caught it with both hands.
It was a pint mason jar of plum jam. A square of faded calico was tied over the lid with kitchen twine, and a white number was painted on top in enamel.
40.
“Forty years of jam!” my sister-in-law Jeanette laughed. “You should get a plaque.”
The whole kitchen was grinning. Nineteen people crowded around Carol’s granite island in Ames, Iowa, on Christmas night, the first Christmas since my mother-in-law died. It was warm, easy, affectionate laughter, the kind people give a joke they’ve told so many times it’s turned into a kind of love.
I held the jar.
It was heavier than it should have been.
I noticed it the way you notice a wrong step on a familiar staircase. Thirty-nine jars of plum jam had passed through my hands over forty years. This one sat in my palms like a stone.
“Thank you, Carol,” I said.
I put it in my bag, said goodnight, and drove the sixty miles home with it on the passenger seat. Belted in.
My name is Linda Haddon. I’m sixty-four. For forty years I let my husband’s family decide who I was, so let me tell you myself.
I was the bookkeeper for a feed and grain co-op in Marshalltown, Iowa, for thirty-one years. I know what a savings bond looks like and what it’s worth. I married Tom Haddon in June 1985 in a Lutheran church with a leaking roof, and I moved sixty miles from my own mother’s kitchen into his family’s.
Tom was the youngest of three. Carol, the oldest, is sixty-eight now, a retired real estate agent with a lacquered silver bob and a talent for compliments that come with a hook in them. Jeanette, two years younger, managed a dental office and has a high, bright laugh she uses like a fan.
Neither of them was ever cruel to me, exactly. They were amused. I was the farm girl their little brother brought home, and for forty years they treated me like a pleasant, slightly comical houseguest who’d overstayed her welcome.
Their mother, Ruth, was harder to read.
She was a small, spare, silent woman, widowed at fifty when her husband Walter’s heart gave out in a hayfield. She raised three children on egg money and stubbornness on a hundred and sixty acres along Linn Creek. She kept her pantry like a bank vault and said maybe a hundred words a day, most of them about the weather. When she looked at you, you felt measured.
At my first Christmas, in 1985, she handed me a pint jar of plum jam with calico over the lid and a number painted on top.
1.
Carol laughed. “Welcome to the family, Linda. Mom’s got you on the jam list.”
I ate the jam. It was dark and tart and not too sweet, with a bitterness at the back of the tongue that I loved. I never told Ruth. Somehow she seemed to know.
Lila Hart is a dedicated Digital Archivist and Research Specialist with a keen eye for preserving and curating meaningful content. At TheArchivists, she specializes in organizing and managing digital archives, ensuring that valuable stories and historical moments are accessible for generations to come.
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