MEMORY AND MARMALADE
Words and pictures by Trista Cornelius
THE ZING OF CITRUS
On a cold winter night in 2019, I watched The Great British Baking Show. I discovered its addictive comfort long after everyone else. On that night, a contestant sliced tight, oval kumquats to make “a quick marmalade.” I’d forgotten all about marmalade.
As a kid, I loved marmalade. My dad liked it, and a dad thing was rare. He was not a cold man, but he did his work and kept things close, so when he shared something—tennis, photography, marmalade—it stayed in my memory. I’d like to think he smothered some toast with it and said, “Here, Kid, want to try it?” However it happened, I remember biting into the dry toast and the numbing zing of citrus. I felt mature for liking it, even though it’s what Paddington Bear ate.
Marmalade is nothing like strawberry jam or grape jelly. It has texture and bitterness.
In 2003 I tasted my first kumquat in Manzanita, on the Oregon coast. On Main Street, the only paved street, were a bakery, a bookstore, a pizza shop, and a health food store. There in the health food store, I studied a basket of bright, oval fruits. A clerk encouraged me to try one. He told me to put it whole in my mouth and chew because the sweet is in the skin and the very tart is in the pulpy center.
BITTER AND MARVELOUS
The enlivening zest brightened my vision and mingled with sea salt lingering on my lips. It stung my tongue the way sugar-coated candy orange slices did when I was a kid. It startled me and soothed me at the same time. Like beach safety pamphlets about storms and tsunamis, the taste warned: be here now because you never know what’s coming.
In both marmalade and kumquats, the sweet and tart stay separate, no matter how you slice it or chew it. The bitter stays suspended in the sweet. Trying marmalade again, decades since I last thought to have it, I’m surprised by just how bitter it is. It’s marvelous. I was right to feel mature liking this as a child.
Since 2018, my dad has lived in a care center for people with dementia. I think about bringing him some marmalade but decide against it. He has trouble swallowing sometimes and occasionally forgets how to eat. I don’t want to risk showing up with marmalade on a day when he doesn’t know what to do with a spoon.
I visit the care center once a week with my mom. We usually join my dad and other residents in the dining room. This is good and bad—good to have others around to spark conversation, bad because we are often there during snack time.
When I was fourteen, I developed a fear of eating in front of other people. I’d sit in the crowded high school cafeteria, lift a spoon of yogurt to my mouth, see my hand shake, and immediately put my lunch away. Opening my mouth felt too intimate and vulnerable, like I might let something in, some bad luck or deforming social disease. So, I just didn’t eat.
The problem faded some time during college. As an adult, I’d mostly forgotten about it except for occasional self-conscious moments during staff meetings or at a formal event. At the care center, however, it comes back.
NOTHING BUT MEMORIES
During snack time, staff and volunteers come through the dining room, eliciting surprisingly articulate words and jokes from my dad. When it’s just us, he’s quiet. I feel awkward trying to talk with him. What do I say to a man I share nothing but memories with, who can’t recall what he ate for breakfast? I can’t talk about home, or he’ll ask where I live and then insist on going there with me. He gets stressed if we ask a question he either doesn’t understand or can’t remember the words to answer.
The people who know him only as he is now, comfortably chat as if there are no land mines behind questions like, “Do you like Chinese food?” As I bolster myself to convince him he can’t leave to go get Chinese food, he chuckles and says he’s pretty sure he likes all food. The dining room community makes the visit easier, until the staff start serving the afternoon snack.
One day, it’s apple crisp, just out of the ovens and making the room smell sweet and inviting. “Would you like some?” one of the caretakers asks, smiling kindly. I decline. I experience shaky anxiety like in high school, but a revulsion too. I can’t open my mouth here for any reason other than polite conversation.
I simply cannot eat here. Not the chocolate the manager offers me. Not the Starburst from the hairdresser. Not the striped bags of fresh-popped popcorn on movie day. Not the cupcakes my mom makes and brings in for my dad’s birthday. Not a sip of coffee, even as I pour a cup for my dad in the gleaming kitchen.
Sam, one of the more alert and verbal residents, pushes a cup of thick white milk toward me, “I’ll share” she says in her deep voice. I like Sam. I like the plaid shirts she wears. I feel comfortable near her and am always glad when we end up sitting with her. Nevertheless, I must swallow my gag reflex as I look at the cold, untouched milk she’s offering and say, “Oh, I’m fine, but thank you.” My dad tries to break the large chocolate chip cookie we brought him, saying to me, “I can share this.” I watch horrified as my mom takes a bite. Why am I horrified?
Do I think dementia is contagious? That I can seal myself against it? Keep it out somehow?
No. Well, maybe.
INSIDE OUTSIDE
Like the clear division between inside the care center and outside the care center, I’ve drawn a line. There was my dad before: not perfect, plenty of complexities between us, but also closeness and connection, someone I could ask for his insights and ideas. Then there’s my dad after— No, actually, that’s not true. The thing with Alzheimer’s is there is no clear “after.” Your person doesn’t change overnight. They change in big ways then return to normal for a moment, making you think you’d dreamt it all. They change in small ways you don’t notice until those ways add up to something big, like mistaking you for a girlfriend from sixty years ago.
I want to draw a line, but I can’t. There is not a clear demarcation: before/after, bitter/sweet, Dad/not-Dad. It’s murky, soft-edged, saccharine and unsatisfying like grape jelly.
I prefer marmalade.You can brace yourself for the bitter, while counting on the reprieve of smooth, gelatinous sweet. You know both will be there, the opposites balancing out each other, making you savor each, grateful for both, your mind alerted to the present moment. Be here now. You never know what’s coming next.
Trista Cornelius / @carrot.condo loves food—cooking it, eating it, drawing it, and writing about it. As a board member with PNWCSA, she supports local farmers. As an artist, she showcases the vibrancy of humble ingredients like beets. As a writer, she explores the ways our lives are shaped by our food choices.