The humidity was low for a change, and the day wasn’t too hot yet, although some big thunderheads would brew later. In the bright sun the blackberry bushes were dense along the small dirt road, with big, luscious berries just begging to be picked and eaten. Not even trying to resist such a temptation, Rose and I worked our way slowly along, filling our berry buckets and our mouths as we went. Oh, my gosh they were good! In the afternoon we made a huge batch of jam, and in the evening we canned it. It was superbly delicious, and we were glad we’d made a lot.

Sometimes when you have something that’s really good, you squirrel some of it away and mete it out over time to prolong the pleasure. So we still had several jars of this exquisite jam left when we moved from Virginia to Alaska in February 1997. We packed it carefully, and it made the trip without a loss. Periodically, we’d open one of those precious jars and then have fond memories of Virginia and blackberry picking as we had a little jam on toast or ice cream.

Last week we were doing some cleaning and found to our surprise that one of those jars had dropped into a time vortex, somehow making it from 1995 straight to 2014. Considering it sufficiently aged (!), we opened it right up and have been tasting a wonderful bit of history. It is every bit as good as it was when we canned it over 19 years ago!

A surprisingly old jar of jam turned up — still delicious