Evidently I’m in domestic mode, because yesterday, for the first time in my entire life, I made blueberry preserves.

We had two almost-over-the-hill packs of blueberries from Sam’s Club in the fridge, and while cleaning the laundry room/pantry I found a box of jam jars we used to use as juice glasses (my five-year-old niece once asked me if we used them because we were too poor to buy regular glasses). So my sick kiddo and I made a small batch of blueberry preserves. Which stained the wooden spoon deep purple and ended up tasting delicious, but strangely (as my son put it) like apple pie.

Must be the allspice, cinnamon and cloves the recipe called for.

Now that I’m feeling jam-capable, I’m starting to think of doing it again. Homemade jam is so yummy, isn’t it? (I used a vegetable steamer basket and a gigundous pot I bought at a thrift store a few years ago to boil the jars and sterilize them.) I once had a jar of apricot-honey preserves that were to-die-for, and I found a recipe the other day that I printed. It’s late for apricots this year, but I can always try to replicate the freezer strawberry jam I remember a neighbor making when we lived in New York. (I bought strawberries today, and found a recipe in the jam jar box. If this kick doesn’t change soon, we’ll be swimming in jars of fruit.)

Perhaps not coincidentally, I just finished a book called Arctic Homestead, by a woman named Norma Cobb, in which berries of all sorts and sizes were canned, as you can imagine, in rather bulky quantities. It may seem like a strange choice of books, but it’s not. I am drawn to the far north — I don’t know why. And ever since reading Laura Ingalls Wilder as a child, I’ve been fascinated by the whole pioneer experience — living off the land, etc. (My favorite show was Grizzly Adams, and I used to hide bags of granola in my room and pretend I lived in the mountains somewhere.) Back in August, I picked up this book at the Sing Lee Alley bookstore in Petersburg, Alaska — along with 6 other books my father-in-law was convinced were going to make me pay a luggage surcharge — and once I started, I finished it in under two days.

The story made fascinating Texas summer reading. Evidently in the early 70s, this woman (Norma) and her husband (Les) packed up their 5 (yes, 5) kids, aged 10 months to 9 years old, put them in two rickety vehicles, and headed to Alaska to claim a homestead. They got there after more than a year or two of running out of money and having to stop and work for a while (all while living in a one-room tent) before heading up again. But eventually they made it, and after a few more snafus (bear attacks, trucks half-falling off cliffs, children being shot in the chest, etc.), proceeded to build a cabin out of trees. Eleven miles from the road. With five children in tow. With no baths, electricity, kitchens, bedrooms, etc. All while living in a bus and/or tent and being harassed by grizzly bears, black bears, and Sasquatches (the story of their Bigfoot encounter is convincing, I’m telling you).

Amazing. Fascinating. Not for the faint of heart. Especially the parts about the shooting and the grizzly tearing the tent apart and leaving — shall we say a ‘deposit’ — in the middle of the tent floor.

At any rate, reading about the one-room-cabin (in which Norma spent an entire winter with five children, no way to communicate or travel to the outside world, and no husband — he was in town working), my not-so-large, fully electric and plumbed house seem rather castle-like. Plush, in fact.

But I still wonder what it would be like to do something like that.

It’s interesting to read about other people’s paths in life. Sometimes our lives seem kind of pre-ordained, but they’re really not, and it’s good to remember that. Not that I’m going to go and start a homestead in Alaska — I couldn’t anyway, since my husband would divorce me, and besides, the Homestead Act ended in 1976 — but experiencing it through someone else’s words is an eye-opener. A nudge, in a way. A reminder that it IS still possible to kick over the traces and do something everyone else thinks is crazy.

Which is a little liberating, don’t you think?