There is a difference between jam and preserves. Jam is sweet fruit you spread on toast. Preserves are a frozen moment in time—a piece of summer that you can carry with you the rest of the year: high grass, long naps, warm evenings, your front porch…
My neighbor Mary Wellington makes preserves.
Mary is a farmer. And not only a single-family farmer--a single farmer. She works three acres of very diverse orchards of Glenn Annie canyon all by herself, on which she grows over fifty varieties of fruit.
Her preserves were so treasured and ubiquitous at local farmer’s markets that many people came to call her “The Jam Lady.” Her Blenheim Apricot jam is intoxicating. Her Blood Orange marmalade is insane. The red raspberry is well… indescribable. But Mary Wellington preserves more than fruit.
If you wander up Glen Annie you will find a two story clapboard farmhouse peeking out from behind the persimmon tree. Mary will greet you with her typical burst of enthusiasm and a clap of her hands. She will launch into an impromptu tour of her orchard and its latest bounty: You will flit from tree to tree sampling God’s offerings in a feast of the senses that is literally Edenic. (I know I get religious about food—but I was raised that way.) Taste the Santa Rosas… Smell the outside of this blood orange… Look at the color on these apricots... Oh don’t mind the bruise—just taste it.
In Margate, New Jersey, there is an ice cream shop that time forgot. It
is called Two Cents Plain and it has little white wire chairs with red
and white striped seats, red and white wallpaper festooned with
whimsical line drawings of flappers in long necklaces and gents in
boaters, and a jar on the counter where customers can deposit tip money
for the scoopers’ college funds. It looks just the same today as it did
in 1979, when I had my fifth birthday party there. 
Peter John is my favorite cousin. He has a knack for saying, in a hilarious manner, what everyone else is thinking. At a family dinner he once joked that in the event of World War III, after the nuclear fall out, he would somehow manage to make it to my dad’s house, because it would be the only place left in Rhode Island that wouldn't run out of food.
Built in 1933, the handsome round red brick building was called "La Ronda de las Estrellas" (the round court of the stars) which provided Westwood village with its early identity. On the south wall of La Ronda (on the Lindbrook drive side) is a hand painted fresco (now faded) of a maid and a man of old Spain, playing his guitar, painted by artist, Margaret Dobson, who flew in from France to do the work, when the building was erected.
First off, I need to explain going bowling in France was never on my wish list, top or bottom.