Sour Cherries and the Trouble With Letting Go

Sitting at a kitchen table facing a quiet Yerevan courtyard, my grandmother holds a pitter in her right hand and with the left, plucks a cherry from the pile, tossing it swiftly into the stapler-like tool. In they go, one by one, pregnant with a seed, and out they come, vulnerable and beaming with brightness. I watch her pink-painted fingernails dip quickly in and out of the crimson mass, yanking the green stems from their heads and tossing them onto a plastic plate. I am unsure where one color finishes and the other begins. It looks like Christmas on the table, but it’s a too-hot day in June, which, in Armenia, marks prime cherry season. And in many homes, just like my grandmother’s, fresh summer fruit means it’s time to make preserves.

On city and rural streets alike, produce sellers chat on sidewalks, tempting passersby with mountains of shiny plums and petite red currants. “Take two kilos for the price of one,” a local fruit seller tells me, pointing her index finger up. “What do I do with two kilos?” I ask naively. “Make jam,” she says. Jam, pronounced the same in my language as it is in English, is thick and clumpy, and can be spread on toast atop a blanket of butter. Preserve, however, which we call muraba, is less viscous and is often slurped from a spoon or stirred into one’s tea. The basics are the same: water, sugar, and fresh seasonal fruit. The preference comes down to consistency, sort of like how you like your peanut butter: chunky or smooth?

Food preservation is, of course, not unique to Armenians. For generations, cultures around the world have packed away their produce. Ethnic groups that needed to survive particularly rough winters developed rituals around pickling, sugaring, and storing their produce to last until the following spring. But today, grocery stores line every street in Yerevan, and even on the snowiest February night, my grandmother won’t be consuming seven jars of homemade sugar-soaked cherries. So who are they for? And why is it so hard for Armenians to part ways with the abundance of fruit we enjoy so heartily on hot summer days?

My grandmother grew up in Gyumri, the second-largest city in Armenia, and while balancing a career as a classical pianist, raising three daughters, and rocking an iconic beehive, she also learned to make jam from recipes passed down over many generations of women. Like most Armenians, she’s lived through a seemingly never-ending list of disasters: a catastrophic earthquake, life under Soviet rule, and stories of parents displaced by genocide, to name a few. But despite it all, to this day, she still reapplies her red lipstick by the hour (even if she’s home alone) and always buys an extra ticket to the ballet—you never know when you might encounter someone craving a spontaneous night out in Yerevan.

While our history has been flush with loss and grief, Armenians have rebuilt new lives around the world, forming an impressive, flourishing diaspora that remains deeply in touch with its roots. The secret ingredient is human connection. Armenians lean on our neighbors, our grandparents, even our local fruit sellers (if you don’t have enough dram for the plums, you can pay them back next time). We’ve made it through dire circumstances by sticking together. But for this reason, we are also not very good at saying goodbye—even to fruit. 

Jam-making for Armenians is more than just about survival; it’s a form of preserving and maximizing moments of connection. The Armenians I know show care by going out of their way for the people they love, even when they can’t afford to do so, whether it’s through giving up their time or their sugar. Once the muraba is done, my grandmother will fill the sterilized glasses, twist the lids firmly shut, and push them far back into a cupboard. These wooden cabinets span an entire wall of her third-floor apartment, right at the entryway, above a rack of umbrellas and jackets (a reasonable spot). Before you leave her home, she’ll climb up on a chair and reach in to grab a jar of preserved something for you to take with you. Name a fruit—any fruit—and she’s pitted, heated, and stocked it away for the winter months. When I ask her why she keeps the jam by the front door, she says, “It’s the coolest part of the house.” 

My babulya, or grandmother, has a preserve for every circumstance. When guests come over, she will serve them a floral special with boiled rose petals on gold-rimmed plates reserved only for guests. If a grandkid is sick, she’ll send out a large supply of a bright orange concoction made from pearl-shaped sea buckthorn berries. It’ll clear out your mucus, she’ll explain on the phone. When the kids fly back to their homes, far from the Motherland (and the cupboard), my grandmother will tightly seal at least three jars in Bubble Wrap and squeeze them into their suitcases. If the bags end up overweight, something else is coming out—never the jam.

Over the years, I’ll watch huddles of friends, family, and neighbors gather by the front door on their way out, unable to say goodbye to each other. They will take turns hugging, laughing, and wiping tears, and then do it a few more times. The jam will get passed around and eventually make its way out of the house, taking the huddle of people with it and leaving behind a silent corridor with my grandmother standing inside. The cupboard will get restocked soon enough, in anticipation of more people who will come and (reluctantly) go. 

There is an elegant apricot tree standing in a backyard in Etchmiadzin, where I spend summer evenings with my in-laws, far away from the city’s fumes. While I have breakfast, I look at the stone fruit that has thumped down from the proud family unit it had grown on, joining its softer-fleshed relatives in the dirt. The apricots stare back at me, plump and lost-looking. “Now what?” they seem to be asking. Maybe, I think, I don’t have to bid farewell just yet. I dial my grandmother: “Babulya, do you want to make some jam?”