Preservation

What stays?

Preservation, which is always transformation, is a delicate process of maintaining the essence of something in a different form. The blackberry-rosemary shrub I made last May does not have the bursting quality of the early summer fruit, but there is a time-traveling aspect to the flavor that allows me the sense of sipping spring in the fall.

Before refrigeration, shrub-making was a popular method of preserving the bounty of warm seasons into the cooler ones. Fresh fruit is macerated in sugar to draw out its liquid, then strained of solids and mixed with vinegar. (They’re sometimes called “drinking vinegars” for this reason.) Once a shrub has settled into itself, it no longer tastes like fruit juice and vinegar. It has become something else, a sweet sharp sensation as distinct from its origin as our present is from our past.

If not what we had before, what is it we preserve into the future? A reminder, but not just that. This is one of those wobbly koan-like questions that can only be communicated through metaphor or direct experience. Tasting the flavor of preserved summer fruit is like recognizing yourself in a baby picture, which is like recognizing yourself in the mirror, which is like telling a story over and over.

Ten years ago (from tomorrow) you told me you were not afraid. But it was a lie because we were both shaking; shaking like trees; shaking like soft black-eyed animals; shaking like hands reaching straight into the fire, because we knew we might burn and how much it would hurt. After years of electricity mediated by electricity, you flew to me and suddenly there was so much of you and so much of us that it was almost more than I could handle. My memory of this time isn’t happy, but sweaty and stuttering and too sharp to be real, like a mushroom trip, and we are still lying on the floor of that living room afraid to meet eyes but reaching across the carpet to touch fingertips. At some point we touched, or we leapt, or we were thrown together into the unknowable space between two people that is momentary proof that nothing is separate.

Preserving a relationship for ten years is by necessity a process of transformation. The thing that is us, which is not quite either one of us, isn’t a shy shaking thing any longer. It flows and drifts. It has taken on different forms over the years, some of which are socially prescribed and legible and some subtle and difficult to define. I don’t look at it directly much now because it has become too familiar to see. It’s not a ghost of something past, though our past ghosts haunt it and give it language and history. It’s not something we can control, though we can practice turning toward it to give it more life. It’s not really ours, the way the earth beneath our jointly-owned home isn’t ours.

Geographically/legally a preserve is land that is mostly left alone, which is to say that it grows and changes according to its own rules rather than ones we impose. What’s preserved is actually the unimpeded changing. Here, taking a step back is a method of preservation.

It would seem that preservation runs antithetical to human nature and to nature itself. Nothing stays, as the fall reminds us. Don’t hold on, because your body will soften like fruit and your memories will crumble like leaves and what you’ll be left holding on to is something rotted and gone.

But the vinegar intervenes, doesn’t it? I hesitate to call it divine, because this metaphor could easily become ridiculous, but there is something in nature, or that is Nature itself, that preserves. There is the going-on and going-on-ness of the earth that is bigger than the small things that live and die and bigger even than the destructive things we as a species can do to it. There is a way of working with nature, of accepting its rules and agreeing to drift, that allows you to tap into its continuity. There is nothing destined or necessary about two humans living beside each other for a very long time, but integrating change is the lesson, the fruit, and the labor of it all. The eternal going-on-ness is going on in each of us and opening to that keeps us going on.

What I’m Cooking