Flashback

It was a simple slip of the tongue that took me back 25 years. My daughter had just made an offhand remark about peanuts.I had recently purchased a megabox filled with individual serving size packets of almonds, cashews and peanuts from our neighborhood Costco. I said, “Go down to the fruit room and get some.” You probably missed the slip of the tongue. You see, my family and I have lived in our home for five days shy of twenty years. In all of that time we have had a pantry or a storage room, but we have never had a fruit room.

So why would I ask my fourteen-year-old daughter to go down to the fruit room to get a bag of peanuts? The answer has everything to do with my childhood. My mother didn’t have an actual orchard in our backyard but we had trees of many varieties.  Peach, pear, apricot, apple and cherry trees as well as vines that produced both green and red grapes. Because we were 14 children total and up to twelve of us kids lived at home at one time, my mom became the queen of bottling fruit.

My mom would bottle at least one hundred quarts each of peaches and pears and applesauce every single year. If it was a good year, she would do the same with apricots and cherries. That doesn’t even count the grape juice, apple juice and vegetables like green beans. On any given day we would use anywhere from two to six quarts of fruit. We might eat the fruit as a dessert or have one of the juices with a meal. And I seldom ate pancakes or waffles with syrup. Instead of sticky maple, we would blend a quart of peaches and a quart of pears and pour that over our pancakes. A tradition that  most of my siblings continue until this day.

Now technically, most nuts are actually fruits according to their botanical meaning and that is one bit of information that I had stored somewhere in the deep recesses of my mind. Is it possible that I made the connection to a peanut being a nut being a fruit and almost instantaneously referred to our pantry as the fruit room? Perhaps, but I also know that in the case of a peanut it is technically a legume, even though I will always call it a nut.

Whatever the underlying cause, that little slip of the tongue took me on a memory vacation that I shared with my daughter and inspired a phone call to my mom. Not only did I verify the numbers but she remembers one year bottling 800 quarts of food for our use during the year. We know that we had wheat, tuna and a few containers of spam in our pantry, but we agreed that, whatever its typical name, a trip to the fruit room, whether in my childhood or as a delightful flashback, is a sweet journey indeed.