Globed Fruit by Sharon Pederson

Globed Fruit

a personal essay
by
Sharon Pedersen 

I take pleasure from unnecessary tasks: wash the kitchen floor by hand to admire the grain of each narrow length of oak, or iron wedding presents from years ago, thinning cotton and linen table napkins and cloths. I grow perennials and wildflowers on the neighborhood common, divide and give them away.  I'm a perfunctory cook, but this fall I made fruit preserves in embossed glass jars sealed with lids and rings, little globes of  peach jam and chili sauce and apple butter, holiday gifts for parents and siblings and in-laws  in western states to whom I'm only legally a family member. Usually I send Missouri products selected from the MO Ag catalog: jams from Centennial Farms in Augusta, Soisson's chocolate truffle sauce, or rum-soaked fruitcakes from the Trappists at Assumption Abbey.  But this year,  I returned to a craft learned when I was still a faithful Mormon housewife.  Summers when my children were young, in July and August, I bought bushels of fruit from roadside stands or farmers markets and canned 400 quarts in my kitchen: peaches and pears and cherries, applesauce and plums.  I don't do that kind of work any more.
 
Apples for the apple butter came from Eckert's, a leisurely drive up the Great River Road to the orchards near Grafton.  The next day I rummaged in kitchen shelves for my splattered old cloth bound Fanny Farmer Cookbook and Home Canning of Fruits and Vegetables, the Ada County Extension Service bulletin from Boise.  The pamphlet was stiff and water dried and stuck to Family Food Stockpile for Survival, a 1964 Civil Defense guide to storage items for bomb shelters.  The cookbook and pamphlets were piled on top of  Family Storage Plan and Passport to Survival by Mormon authors, survival stuff I hadn't looked at in years.

Stockpile begins with the somber and ridiculous, "If you and your family survive the explosion..." Passport, which I'd consulted earnestly as a young mother, mixed Mormon rhetoric about the last days with emergency recipes for stored wheat, honey, dried milk and salt, emphasizing wheat gluten as a meat substitute.  Recipes for Creme Gluten A La Emergency, toasted wheat drinks, even wheat based ice cream were combined with suggestions for soap and charcoal making in outdoor camps and how to collect water in a solar still, an apocalyptic Hints From Heloise.

Looking through those old books and pamphlets reminded me of church doctrines I hadn't thought about in a long time.  For almost two hundred years Mormon prophets have been predicting God's judgments: hailstorms and famine, civil strife and hardship, warning the saints to  "....be prepared in all things against the day when tribulation and desolation are sent forth upon the wicked."  Because church leaders still teach the wicked will suffer, but the righteous, who store the necessary provisions, will prevail, home canning is much an article of faith as that God restored His true church and priesthood to Joseph Smith in 1820.  Even now members are stockpiling against the disasters they anticipate with the Y2K computer problem.  As a young woman, I was skeptical of protective claims for righteous living and food storage, but bought any book that promised to help me be a good mother and take care of my family.  I spent busy, hard working years as a Mormon housewife, home with babies and growing children, practicing the old-fashioned skills of provident living.  I sewed most of their clothes and mine, canned fruit without sugar so they wouldn't get cavities, ground wheat and baked dense loaves of whole wheat bread.

I suspected if the food supply weren't destroyed in a national or natural disaster, people would take it if we didn't share, and suggested we stockpile cigarettes and whiskey to trade, both forbidden to the faithful.  GI's offered them, and nylon stockings and chocolate, I reasoned, for less compelling needs during war.  Barter would as useful as stored food.  My husband was horrified.  He agreed to chocolate, which I hid behind stacks of fifty-pound plastic buckets of Turkey Red wheat. The nine-year-old ate it all one spring, a hundred pounds of Cadbury Bars.

I gave up canning about the time I left the Mormons, tired of the rhetoric of eternal rewards and the quasi-pioneer lifestyle as handmaiden to male authority, annoyed with simple answers and narrow roles, unwilling any longer to fulfill the expectations of a culture I'd never wanted to be part of.  I was baptized a Mormon at the insistence of my mother, who had dreams and visions, and a conversion experience when I was eleven.  I did it unwillingly, hoping it would make her happy and love me.  Mormons promise home could be heaven on earth, and I adapted to their myths and commandments with uneasy longing.

The church offered meaningful activities and approval to my mother which she did not find in the angry chaos of her life.  Depressed at home, resentfully lamenting to me the details of her unhappy childhood and marriage and the work and mess and ingratitude of a houseful of kids,  she was energized and fulfilled by church activities.  The Mormons lavish attention on converts. Theirs is a constantly self-congratulating culture of converts, and my mother liked being "Sister Smith."

Her depression, however, remained, and kept her indifferent to me except as someone to share the burdens of housework and child care, and to hear her stories.  She wasn't interested in my school work, the library books I read all the time, or my problems.  A tentative hint to her that I was lonely, shy about making friends, wished we lived in town so maybe I could visit the public library, even a schoolmate, always triggered a woeful tale from her life.  I could please her by listening sympathetically, and by going to church.  I could please my father by not fighting with my mother and helping: with the six younger siblings, with the mountains of housework, in his office.  He didn't go to church himself, but he thought it was good for children.

As I hauled canning equipment upstairs from the basement, I thought of  that primly determined young woman, so hopeful of the structure of rules and commitment.  I gave up obedience and sacrifice years ago. I hardly do housework any more, except as mindless, soothing diversion.  Now I can for pleasure.  I like the assortment of simple tasks and tools: dark blue enamel canner with aluminum jar rack and sloping lid, wide mouth funnel for filling jars, tongs with handles and curved bars at the ends: techno-canning forceps for lifting hot jars from the boiling water bath.  I like the noise of  jars clattering upside down in boiling water in a stainless steel skillet, rings and lids bubbling in a smaller pan, the tidy rhythms of washing and sorting and slicing and pouring.

I sat on a kitchen stool, singing a phrase from an old song, pushing apple chunks through the food grinder with one hand, turning the handle with the other, the metal cone shredding scrubbed, unpeeled apples for cooking in the big soup pot.  I mixed and stirred and seasoned apples and cider, and ran outside and around the house after each batch, just to come back in for the smell of lemon and cinnamon and cloves.  My fingertips shriveled, wrinkley from countless washings.  The lines of little jars lengthened beside a pile of wet wadded towels on the counter. The dry rasp of fresh ones felt good on my hands.

I sang the line as I worked,  Away, I'm bound away. The sun slanted through the kitchen  window.  The house was quiet except for cooking sounds, my husband in church, the children grown and  living on their own.  My shoulders were satisfyingly stiff ; my back ached.  I poured and capped the last batch and lowered the rack into the boiling water.  Cooling jars sealed with clicks and snaps.  I sat down again to rest, the phrase insistent in my head, a song, from a book I couldn't quite remember.  I dumped apple cores into the compost bucket and lugged it outside to bury in the pile. Working the digging fork, exposing red wigglers and sweet smelling dirt, I remembered, Across the Wide Missouri.  The title came to me as I tossed a worm back in the hole.

I found the book on the dining room shelves, the story of the mountain men by Bernard DeVoto, the song on its first page written in hill country dialect.  Oh Shennydore, it said, I long to hear you, lament of the adventurer, the traveler, the pioneer.  But I was looking for the Mormons.  DeVoto had written about them in Year of Decision, 1846, their flight from Illinois across the frozen Mississippi, through Iowa Territory to the Missouri River and the Great Basin, led by  Brigham Young into the valley of the Great Salt Lake.  The song and the stories were jumbled in my head, as memory is, both books still on my shelves.

De Voto didn't particularly like the Mormons,  although he believed them god-fearing and hard-working.  But he wrote with energy and reverence for all his subjects, and it was from him I learned to honor the Mormons in a way that helped me live among them, and later, to leave them.

De Voto had grown up in the Salt Lake valley and he considered Brigham Young a genius. In its earliest days, the Mormons had instituted the United Order, a theocratic and practical working communism.  The saints quickly established Orderville in Southern Utah Territory, all property and labor held in common under the direction of the prophet.  The project failed, DeVoto believed, because Brother Brigham lived hundreds of miles away.  I was never a true believer, but I was an idealist, and those Mormon notions of pioneer community appealed to me.

I thrilled to De Voto's tales of courage and sacrifice and his story of  Sister Ann Richards, a plural wife, is marked and soft from many readings.  Her husband Franklin D. Richards had been called from Illinois to England after five proselytizing missions in the United States.  Frequent missions were common among the saints, but in 1846 they were being driven from Illinois by Gov. Lillburn Boggs's Extermination Order, and Brother Richards was gone.

 He had married Sister Ann four years before, had been sealed to her
  in the temple in the everlasting covenant.... and a week later had taken 
  Sister Elizabeth McFate as his second wife. Sister Ann had her two-year-
  old daughter, Wealthy Lovisa, with her in the wagon - and Sister Ann was
  big with another child and her hour was near. There was no suitable food
  for her or Wealthy Lovisa.  Many days they could not have a fire... but 
  sometimes they managed to keep one going and then Sister Ann could brew
  a pinch of tea from the pound which a neighbor had given her before she
  left Nauvoo. The Word of Wisdom forbade it but she could warm her body
  and cheer her mind with it....

 Twenty days out from Sugar Creek her term was full. The wagons 
  stopped and a midwife was summoned, a Gentile whom the Saints had heard
  about. The hag demanded a fee in advance; Sister Ann had no money;  
  a woolen bedspread would do.... Little Isaac was born, and he died at once.
  Little Wealthy Lovisa had been sick when they left Sugar Creek, and week by 
  week her strength failed.... (She) lived till they got to the Missouri River, and
  then died.  Brigham told Sister Ann, "It shall be said of you that you have come
  up through much tribulation."

Here was struggle and sorrow and uncertainty that meant something.  I wanted to find such courage within myself.  I didn't care about the visions of Joseph Smith, but I did want to believe in sacrifice and community.  I came to adulthood with the Hippie generation, social protest movements and communes.  The Mormons offered a theocratic model, although they would be offended with the comparison, but I was scared to be a Hippie.  I wasn't sure how to be a self.  My father demanded obedience and no back-talk, my mother expected me to feel sorry for her.  Although my father finished college when I was ten, my parents had come from families where hard work barely ensured survival and choice did not include questioning authority.

Mormons expound on their uniqueness, but most of their rules have always seemed like basic human ethics to me.  My parents didn't attend church at all till I was ten, but sometimes we were sent to Sunday School.  My mother read to us from Egermeier's Bible Story Book, with its serene drawings of maps and tidy palm trees and camels, and from her King James Version.  Both were full of angels and visions and heavenly manifestations and I read them seriously as a kid.  I guessed I was a Christian, although even then I knew about the visions of Buddha and Muhhamed, as important as those of Moses and Elijah and Isaiah.  They all taught about the same thing I thought: be kind to your neighbor, help the poor, do not steal or kill.  Joseph Smith didn't seem much different.  By the time I was an adolescent, I wanted to run a way from home, but I'd been afraid to do that too, so I decided I'd be good.  Mormon women were good, they seemed happy, and they were kind to me.  During the years I lived in that certain and stifling security of the rule of patriarchy, I knew that I would leave, but not before I took what I needed.

For reasons having little to do with belief or faith, I spent my undergraduate years at Brigham Young University.  I didn't want to go there but I refused go to the local university and live at home.  The school was cheap, I had earned enough with summer jobs to pay tuition, and it was a thousand miles from where I lived in Oregon.  I was soon uneasy with the earnest certainty of the students as well as the professors, and didn't know how to deal with my conflicts.

In the spring of my first year, William Barret, author of  Irrational Man, a study  of Existentialism,  lectured in the English department building.  BYU does not encourage alternative points of view among its students.  It is God's university educating His faithful, and other beliefs are examined only to compare with the rightness of the one true church.  Barret's visit was a  miracle in my  life.  In an detached monotone he spoke of the absurdity of the modern world, the horrors of the Second World War and the indifferent and malevolent universe of Sartre and Camus.  Camus had said that in such a world we create ourselves by our choices and the actions that follow.  Belief in God, the official dogmas of religion, any external authority, was irrelevant.

Sitting in that cream painted classroom with the cinder block walls I experienced a sense of lightness and freedom.  I didn't have to believe in Mormonism.  I needn't feel guilty about it any more, either.  What mattered was the integrity of my actions.  Existentialism stressed personal responsibility.  I was good at that.  I naively dismissed Camus' warnings against conformity. Mormon ethics were as good as any, I decided, intent on stability in my life.  My father's harshness I attributed to his lack of church background of any kind.  Mormons promised happy homes to the faithful.  I told myself I didn't have to believe to marry a nice Mormon guy,  a committed member who would be a kind husband and devoted father.  I found one, too.  It has complicated my life intensely.

The Mormon women I saw almost daily in church  activities believed  personal fulfillment came from strict adherence to traditional roles as wives and mothers in willing submission to patriarchy. My mothering instincts were anxious, neurotic, the long-clawed protectiveness of a spring grizzly with cubs.  But neurotics can make pretty good mothers.  I learned the skills from  those Mormon women for whom homemaking and motherhood was their daily craft, and sometimes, high art.  They believed they were making the world a better place.  They still do. I tried to live like that.

When I was involved, Mormon church meetings were scheduled almost every day of the week.  Monday night was Family Home Evening.  You didn't see faithful Mormons on the streets Monday night, unless they were all together participating in a family activity after the lesson from the official church manual.  I prepared our lesson, fixed a special desert, had my children give little flannel stories, and my husband and I played games with them afterward.  Tuesday afternoons I taught Primary,  religious study and singing for children ages 3-11.  One Wednesday morning a month I taught a class for the women's auxiliary, Relief Society.  An evening session was held for those women who "had" to work for pay.  But working outside the home is still discouraged by priesthood leaders unless one is widowed, divorced, or one's husband is a hopeless cripple. Wednesday night youth classes were held for teenagers, but I didn't have any then.  Two Thursday nights a month I attended the auxiliary leadership and teacher training meetings for Primary and Relief Society.   Friday night was reserved for church socials or speakers from Salt Lake in an annually scheduled lecture series on gospel topics.

Once a month I was assigned, with my Visiting Teaching companion, to visit four other member women in their homes,  give them another church lesson, and chat, offering fellowship and concern, and taking in food if someone in the family was ill.  Men were assigned families to visit as well.  They went with Home Teaching companions.  Women visit during the day, but men visit only at night, when husbands are present.  I also compiled and wrote the Ward Newsletter.

Sunday meant Sunday School, with morning classes for all age groups,  and an evening service, called Sacrament Meeting, the Communion service, with speakers and congregational singing.  For years I sat in church with four children, carefully dressed in their Sunday clothes, and shuffled restless bodies, Quiet Books, soft toys, crayons and paper and little baggies of Cheerios and raisins to help them be "reverent," while my husband visited other congregations as a member of the stake high council, or presided as bishop of our ward.  Choir practice was held between the two Sunday services, but fortunately I don't sing.  During those years when my husband was bishop, an unpaid, lay position, he spent most evenings and weekend days at the church.  I brought his mid-Sunday meal there, literally on a silver tray, while the choir practiced and the kids giggled and bickered in the waiting car.

By the time the youngest child was in school, I was desperately bored, desperate, and depressed.  I couldn't find another Mormon women who felt the same way,  although a group of journalists and therapists in Salt Lake City had made a video, "Mormon Women and Depression" in the late 70s.  Church leaders issued an edict that the video was not to be shown in church buildings.  Members were permitted, but not encouraged, to watch and discuss it in their own homes.  Women's problems were solved in service to others, the men of the priesthood said.  If you feel bad, do more.  I felt bad and couldn't do anything.  I gave up all my church jobs and went to a psychiatrist.  One day a friend from another ward asked me the standard Mormon conversation opener,  "What are you doing in the church now?"

"Nothing." I said.  

"Nothing?" she asked again, aghast.  "I've never heard of that in my life." 

She was like the women in my ward who had worked with me and taught my children, women who devoted their lives to their families and church and meetings, and believed in me as one of the faithful.  I had been one of the faithful.  I had given all my energies and abilities to serving others.  I was good at being good.  Why was I miserable? 

I'd been an English major in college, but for years I seldom read serious fiction.  I'd think of Huck on the river, and wince.  "You can't pray a lie," he'd said.  I told myself I wasn't living a lie since I didn't believe.  Yet year after year I was trading personal integrity for the comforts of a peaceful marriage, time at home with my kids, a quiet, stable life.  I couldn't figure out how to have both.  I got a lot of praise for my "lovely" family and my "wonderful" husband, doing what "God" wanted me to do.  But I knew I was hiding.  I also knew I couldn't continue in the role of faithful Mormon housewife.

And year after year, as the church gave public support to political positions I didn't believe in, and I told myself time with my children was more important than issues, I knew I was not acting with integrity.  I'm not an Existentialist, I'd think, I am a coward.  The church didn't give the priesthood to blacks then, or women.  It's policies were anti-feminist and anti-abortion. The leaders sent busloads of women just like me, well, sort of just like me, to capitols in western states to protest ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment.  I was pretending.  I was dishonoring the believer.  I asked to be excommunicated.

I explained my dilemma to the bishop of the ward,  my unhappiness and my sense of blasphemy.  I told him I thought highly of the members I had known and worked with.  I was not anti-Mormon, I told him, but it was a mockery of sacred things, since I didn't believe, to sit among the faithful who did.  He was troubled and uneasy.  "You have positive feelings toward the church." he said, "Why don't you just stay? It would be so much easier for everyone."   

I was surprised with his counsel, but sorry for him, too.  Men have the priesthood but women hold up that world.  Church  roles are clearly defined: leadership for men, motherhood and service for women.  He was worried about my influence on other members, but I think he was bewildered, too.  Why would a "good" woman want to leave?   Later, in a moment of anguish,  my husband said, "You want everyone to be just like you. You don't want people to believe in anything!"  I knew my leaving would hurt him deeply, and it has, and I'm very sorry for that.  I wasn't a convert or a true believer, but I do believe in freedom.  It had taken me difficult years to learn as much about its responsibilities as I knew about obedience.  The Mormons were decent people and I didn't want to change them.  They lived their choices.  I had to learn to live mine.   

Not long after I finished canning the apple butter,  a friend sent a note and the funeral program of Marje Hassler, a mutual acquaintance in our Mormon ward from those church years, who had died at eighty-one.  On the program cover was her 50th wedding anniversary photo.  I hadn't seen her in twenty years; she'd been a widow for ten.  But there she was, looking handsome and capable, her thick blonde hair curved around her face, probably still pinned in back in the luxuriant knot she wore when we worked together in the church.  She looked out at me, smiling, her hand on her husband's, the same funny looking Bill, like a balding frog, his head tipped fondly toward her. 

Marje was a believer and a doer.  She knew God's purpose for her: a life of service to others.  She embraced it as a daughter of Mormon pioneers.  She was a formidable woman.  She worked on political campaigns, for school bond issues and city park equipment, church socials and neighborhood parties.  She worked in support of every issue with which I silently disagreed:  anti-abortion, anti-Equal Rights Amendment, anti-sex education in the schools.  She had no use for feminism.  She wasn't interested in the priesthood for women. She was certain of the rightness of her Mormon God, the authority of priesthood leadership, and her dedication to the church and her community.

For years she was a Stake Relief Society president, supervising the spiritual education and welfare needs of several thousand women in our Mormon stake, a geographic grouping of six or eight congregations.  Sister Hasler knew the Bishop's Handbook as well as any Mormon bishop. She knew the Welfare Plan and she was a tireless administrator.  Stake Presidents deferred to her judgment; new bishops were in awe of her.  She wrote a book, Delegate Authority With Confidence: Planned Success for Volunteer Activities, detailing her system.  She believed the purpose of all volunteer activities, including those of church, was to build the people who served in them.

When her beloved Bill died, people could not believe church leaders had called her to a volunteer position supervising the laundry in the Denver temple.  She never refused a church call, and members are taught to accept every church job with humility, but it was like ordering retired General Colin Powell to volunteer in the Pentagon cafeteria, peeling celery and serving the Jell-o. Temple robes and washing machines were easier to manage than people, she told friends.  She was grieving Bill, she said,  and any service was worthy.  It was her privilege to work wherever the Lord needed her.

Years before, at a church meeting in her home, she sent me to the storage room in her basement for some teaching materials.  Shelves of bottled fruits, canned goods and dry foodstuffs lined the walls.  Her peaches were canned whole, with the skins on, two or three to a bottle.  I had always scalded and peeled mine, slicing them from the water-filled sink into jars in meticulous layers like inverted artichokes.  Sister Hasler was old enough to be my mother and her competence and industry was intimidating, but I was amazed at this shortcut.  Coming up the stairs, I asked her about the peaches. "Of course," she said, "they're delicious that way, and much easier. Why take the skins off?" 

I was not close friends with Marje Hasler, but I admired the life she lived, as I admire those other women of years ago: Ruth and Sandy, Lala, Mary, Charlotte and Iris and Joan, Glendora and Maggie.  Sisters in the church, and to me.       

Today my parents and all but one sibling, and those of my husband, are active and devout Mormons.  He and one of our children remain devout, and pray for my return to the true church. To the ones I sent the boxes of preserves, I am a covenant breaker, an apostate.  I asked for excommunication, and in the sense most important to them, am no longer a member of the eternal family.  Mormons believe very few will go to hell.  Their notion of the afterlife is cheerful and generous.  Just about everyone will get some reward in heaven.  No existential dread here, no fear of loneliness or the abyss.  But because I have participated in temple rituals, their most holy ceremonies, the ones who love me worry I may be in danger of eternal darkness, cut off forever from life with God and them in the Celestial Kingdom.  Others watch me closely at family gatherings, disapproving, expecting signs of remorse and guilt, or an aimless, dissolute life.

"The serpent beguiled me," says the Mormon Eve in their scriptures, "and I did eat.... Were it not for our transgression we never should have had seed, and never should have known good and evil,  the joy of our redemption, and the eternal life which God giveth unto all the obedient."  Mormons do not believe in original sin.  To them the fall is a blessing, not a curse, life an opportunity to prove oneself worthy.  Salvation is a gift but exaltation in the Celestial Kingdom is earned through obedience and submission, sacrifice and  hard work.  For years I struggled with the simplicity of their vision and the generosity and compassion it produced.   It is bittersweet, but a relief to be free of it.

Another day I wrapped each jar in tissue and bubble wrap and newspaper, admiring the globes of yellow-orange, dark chunky red, soft brown, their harvest colors muted and lovely, their heft satisfying in the palm. Their sweet, unnecessary richness and sensuous associations pleased me.  Tomatoes were called love apples once.  Some say the fruit in the Garden was an apricot.  I like to think a peach, mythic genital symbol.  I tucked the jars in threes in assorted small boxes from Builders Plumbing Supply for mailing, neatly taped and addressed over pictures of flexible faucet connectors and pipe fittings. Carrying the boxes to the car, I imagined my  relatives and the other good Mormons I have known, in the Celestial Kingdom, their heaven lined with jars of bottled fruit casting a pale, clear light on the faithful.

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