Cherry Preserves

When I was very young,
I used to descent the steep stairs
To the earthen damp of my grandparents' basement
And pull a jar of cherry preserves from the cobwebbed shelf.
Smiling in her canvas gardening shoes and
Red shirt (because bees can't see red, you know),
Gram would crack open the seal and spoon the cerise globes
Into an orange plastic bowl on her avocado green oven.
It tasted like the Spring, like the Spring smells like chives
And dirt and old curtains and PBS and egg salad and Wind Song.

I was cleaning her basement in the winter,
The door to the outside open like a wound and
My mother's broom scraping the earthen walls like
My spoon scrapes the inside of a pumpkin on Halloween,
Grandma's fingers meticulously picking the seeds from the membrane.
I saw the dusty jars on the shelves and wanted to open one-
Never mind the botulism-
And thread the cherries on to my fingers and suck them off
One by one
And smell the Spring again, like the Spring smells like Easter
And golf clubs and afternoons and pot roast and those
tiny red potatoes...

But I couldn't touch them
Because they wouldn't be what they were.

Best to leave them looking pretty on the shelf.