We’ve reached the last days of summer when the air is sticky and our vegetable gardens are at their most bountiful. And yet, with this bounty comes the whisper of autumn: cantaloupes left on the vine are composting in their row, the lettuce has all gone to seed, asters and goldenrod have popped up among the wild asparagus ferns. Soon, nothing will be left but the heartier vegetables–potatoes, leeks, kale–and we’ll till the rest of the garden back into the ground.

But right now, our days are filled with tender-fleshed tomatoes. We’re popping Sungolds into our mouths, warm and ripe and straight from the vine, cutting Brandywines into thick slices and devouring them raw, peeling and simmering Black Krim and Red Vine tomatoes into sauces and preserves, jams and salsas. My bare pantry shelves are slowly filling with dozens of glass jars packed with tomatoes–an ombré of yellow, orange and red.

A few days ago, I found a 125 mL jar in the very back of the pantry. The label read:“Honey Sweetened Cherry Tomato Jam, Summer 2020.” I cracked the seal on the jar and dipped my pinky into its sticky contents. I tentatively licked my finger. The jam tasted exactly as it should: sweet and tangy, a little bit spicy, a hint of smoked paprika. I know how much can change in a year, not one of us has escaped this lesson since Covid-19 insidiously slipped into our everyday vernacular, our everyday lives. But miraculously, the contents of this jar have remained exactly the same.

In a year from now, maybe I’ll be breaking the seal on the last jar of 2021’s harvest. So much will have changed. All four of my children will be in school full time, my eldest daughter will be a teenager, my husband and I will have celebrated 15 years of marriage, I’ll have left my 30’s behind, and all of us in the wider world, will hopefully have found a way to live more harmoniously with one another, to recognize connective tissue everywhere, to look into one another’s eyes and see, not a stranger, but a part of ourselves reflected back.

So much will change, but not inside these jars lined up on my pantry shelf. They will stay the same. Like photographs, like stories written down.

These past few weeks, I’ve found myself holding on to my kids a little bit longer, saying yes to bubble tea on the way home from the library, backyard campouts with their Daddy on the trampoline, wearing bathing suits in afternoon downpours, waiting on our dirt road at dusk to catch a glimpse of the coyote pups playing in the hay field, reading just one more chapter before bed.

I’m foraging through these moments and collecting the fruit of these last days in tandem with one another and the slow rhythm of our life. It’s between my teeth, in my throat, the juice running down my chin. I’m taking in, not only the flesh, but the skin, its sweetness.

This. This is transubstantiation. 

I’m plucking this ripe and perfect fruit from the vine and filling buckets of it. I’m savoring the exact flavor of these halcyon days and I’m delaying their inevitable disappearance while I stack these moments in my heart like jars of tomatoes lining my pantry shelves.

I’m building an altar here, hoarding this embarrassment of plenty.

I’m sitting with it.

I’m letting it swell within me so when the life in my bones feels empty and hollowed out, I can fill myself with the marrow I’ve sucked from every joyful moment of this hard and holy year.