Annie set the oven to preheat at 200 degrees, and then prepared some oatmeal. Before sitting down to breakfast, she placed six eight-ounce canning jars on top of a baking sheet in the oven to sterilize and also put the lids in a Pyrex bowl and poured boiling water over them from the kettle. Then, after adding a sprinkling of wheat germ and flax, a dash of cinnamon, and a splash of milk over the oatmeal, Annie was ready to sit down to eat too.
Fortified by her “power oatmeal,” as she liked to call it, Annie poured the rose-hip juice into a large wide pot on a back burner of the stove. She pulled several lemons from the refrigerator and squeezed until she had a half a cup of lemon juice. After adding it to the pot, Annie stirred in a package of pectin. While waiting for the mixture to come to a boil and the pectin to dissolve, she measured out three and a half cups of sugar. The high emotions of the previous day dissolved like the pectin granules in the warmth of the homey process. It all came back to Annie as though she had canned a batch with Gram last month rather than thirty years ago.
Once the mixture began to boil, Annie stirred in the sugar until it had also dissolved. The sweet tangy smell was beginning to perfume the large kitchen. The final ingredient to be added was a one-fourth teaspoon of butter, swirled in before Annie allowed the pot to come to a hard boil. The orangey pink mixture bubbled, circles rising in domes until they stretched themselves too thin and burst.
Once the hard boil began, Annie flipped the little minute timer that sat beside the stove and took the sterilized jars from the oven as the sand flowed from top to bottom. The last grain tumbled from the top and Annie took the pot off the burner to pour the jelly into the jars, leaving a quarter inch of headspace below each rim. After securing the lids and rings on each jar, giving the jars a water bath was the final step. As the jars cooled from their bath, Annie listened for the familiar popping sound that signaled the lids had sealed properly. Once they were lined up on the shelf of the baker’s rack, Annie thought the jelly looked like jars of sunrise. So often she had seen the cheerful color splashed along the horizon as a day began.
Although the sun had risen while she was busy in the kitchen, Annie poured another cup of coffee and went out onto the porch to see what kind of mood the weather was in. Settled into a wicker rocker, Annie was pleased to see the sky was an easygoing blue with lazy white clouds that looked in no hurry to blow elsewhere. Fog could blanket the coast sometimes for days at a time, but as far as Annie could tell, this wasn’t going to be one of those days. However, the weather could be as temperamental as Boots around here. One thing she knew for certain was that she would need to bring layers of clothes and wear plenty of sunscreen on her whale-watching adventure. Not only could weather change with breathtaking speed, but the gentle water of a harbor often bore little resemblance to what the locals called “a bit of chop” once a boat entered the Gulf of Maine.
A bit of chop. Annie sipped her coffee, thinking how well the phrase fit her experience of the last twenty-four hours. She could relate to how Peter and the other disciples had panicked on a stormy sea. Gazing to the right side of the porch over toward the harbor, Annie prayed for the grace to handle whatever was to come before “Peace, be still” reigned over the puzzling situation with Gwen and John. Sometimes “a bit of chop” can help clarify where our true comfort lies, Annie knew. Her coffee mug empty and her heart strengthened, Annie went back inside to work on her crochet project until the time came for her to leave for the docks.
****
Annie arrived at Todd Butler’s lobster shack at the same time Ian and Cecil did. A few lobster boats were moored, having put in a full day’s work on the water already. A grin spread across his face, Ian gave her a hearty greeting. As Annie was saying hello to him and Cecil, Ian stepped closer to her and took a deep breath. “Mmmmm, you smell wonderful, Annie!”
Annie laughed. “How can you tell? All I can smell is fish bait!”
“When you’ve been around the lobster shacks as much as I have, I guess you adapt to the smell. White smell instead of white noise, in a sense. But I have to know, what is that scent?” Ian started to lean even closer for another sniff but thought better of it.
“It would be a mix of rose-hip jelly and sunscreen, I think,” said Annie, resisting the urge to giggle. She stole a glance at Cecil and saw that he was enjoying the exchange as though Ian was a precocious boy. “I made the first batch of the season this morning.”
“If it tastes as good as it smells, may there be many more batches to come,” Ian said, as the door to the lobster shack opened. Todd Butler strode toward them, pulling a battered cap over hair the same color as his brother’s. It was longer with an unruliness Annie found hard to imagine on Ian.