<

For Christmas, 2002, I got the brilliant idea to make homemade pomegranate jelly. We'd stopped in Chicago on our way home from visiting my in-laws at Thanksgiving, and we had dinner with a friend in the Indian/Pakistani district. After gorging ourselves on curry, B. and I held hands and walked the street, the air filled with the crisp chill of snow and the warmth of subcontinent spices. I was so enchanted with the neighborhood that when we left, I found myself with enough sari silk scraps to clothe half the extras in a Bollywood extravaganza and enough pomegranates to feed them. Two cases of pomegranates.

Oh, c'mon! They were 25 cents apiece! I was paying two dollars each in St. Louis. Even if I was deathly allergic to pomegranates, I would have bought at least a case at that low, low price.

I set to work making my jelly a few days after the Chicago visit. Just as I was starting, I got a call from my parents, informing me that their 12-year-old Lab, Mindy, had died unexpectedly that day. She was the last stray I drug home before graduating from high school, and I was heartbroken. I poured all of my grief into crushing the ever-living fuck out of every one of those pomegranate seeds. I crushed them in my fists, pounded them with a kitchen mallet, squashed them with a heavy rubber spatula. Granted, that's how I would have gone about extracting the juice from four dozen pomegranates even on a good day, but it just felt exceptionally comforting to engage in something so tactile, so violent on a day when I was so hurt and sad.

I wish I'd taken pictures of my kitchen after the jelly-making. My walls were a lovely pale yellow, my stove a gleaming white. By the time I was finished, it looked like something from one of those A&E true crime shows. If anyone had walked into my kitchen and learned of Mindy's demise, they would have assumed that I'd put her in a pot on the stove and boiled her until she exploded.

Suddenly, my newly-painted red kitchen seems pretty practical, doesn't it?

Anyway, long and pointless story short, I'm never making pomegranate jelly again. Next time I find myself in an Indian-Pakistani neighborhood, B. is allowed to throw a pomegranate at my head if I even think about buying them. We haven't devised a suitable punishment to prevent my sari silk remnent problem. But the jelly was really good.

A few days ago I bought the biggest, firmest pomegranate I could find with a plan in mind: Clara "Pom Pom" Jane and I will start a new holiday tradition in which we buy a pomegranate as big as her head, bust it open, tear it apart with our bare hands and luxuriate in all its pomminess. I cut into it tonight while B. was giving her a bath. When she came running from the bathroom, stark naked, it seemed like perfect pomegranate time.

I offered her a seed, which she placed on her tongue, face scrunched in skepticism. She removed it several times, rolled it around in her mouth, and tried to repeat the word "pomegranate" around its tartness. She quickly got bored and skuttled her naked butt to the living room.

But five minutes later she was back. The pomegranate's siren song, it's rich and deep. And for thirty minutes we sat, pulling the plump seeds from the flesh and lolling them in our mouths, our hands sticky and purple. Clara Jane's chin, chest and belly streaked with rivulets of juice.

"They just don't do anything for me," B. said, making a face after crunching a seed. "Have fun with the horrible diaper she's going to produce tomorrow. Ew. Seeds."

So I guess the pomegranates will just be a mother-daughter thing, a little bit of sensuous luxury we'll indulge every winter. And someday, she'll be big enough to take to Chicago and lug all those cases of poms to the car. I'll need my arms free for the sari silk scraps.