Volume 4, Issue 9: Permission to Play

This is a paid subscriber-only issue of Enthusiastic Encouragement & Dubious Advice. Please do not forward this email but feel free to share a link to this post on the site. I appreciate your support and respect for my work!

Hi friends! Being that this weekend was the first Mother’s Day after losing my mom, I planned a whole day of distraction for Nicole and I. We got up quite early and drove about 45 minutes east to go mulberry picking. We picked six pounds of mulberries and it was 87 degrees by the time we were done. Then we stopped for In-N-Out Burger and headed back home so that I could have my first go at making shelf-stable jam with the mulberries. I’ve made refrigerator jam before, but I hadn’t canned anything yet. My friend let me borrow her equipment and I successfully made jam with half the mulberries on Sunday. I planned on making the other half into jam the following day after work. We went to bed on Sunday tired but pleased with ourselves.

On Monday when I went to make the rest of the jam we found that the berries had already gone moldy. They were definitely not moldy the day before. This minor inconvenience threw me into total meltdown and all the grief that I had been trying to avoid on Mother’s Day came crashing into me. Still, we had a lovely day on Sunday and I have come to the conclusion that some of it is because there is nothing that we did that day that was work or that I was trying to monetize or solely mine for content. Yes, I wrote about it just now but I didn’t post dozens of photos on Instagram and I’m also not selling any of this jam nor do I have the desire to.