Every afternoon, these past weeks, you would find me, hot and sweaty, up on a short ladder amongst the scratchy, itchy fig leaves.

I am being “et down” by mosquitoes, since I forgot to spray my ankles with yard fogger. (All I had at the time.) And I kept telling myself not to fall, since I didn’t want to be the old lady who broke her hip falling out of a fig tree.

I only gather the low- and middle-spaced figs, leaving the high ones for the birds, and leaving the ones the bugs or birds have bitten on for them, too.

Once, the smallest green inchworm in the world claimed a fig right beside me, so I let him have it.

An offering to the gods, I figured.

The fig crop in South Georgia, all comes in, pretty much in a two-week span of time, and you have to get them right away or never. 

I remind myself of my German grandmother, who would not let one blackberry on her farm go to waste. I don’t want to waste one fig either, other than the bitten ones.

My grandmother made blackberry cordia — she called it cordial — a dark liquid, that she dished out in doses to sick people and poured into small glasses on special occasions. Everyone in the family loved it. My father swore it was because of the high alcohol content, which might have been partly true, but the glasses were small, so no matter.

She put an egg (raw) in the shell into the berry juice and added sugar until the egg floated. That was her recipe.

After taking the egg out and a period of fermentation, she bottled the cordial. Whenever I was picking blackberries in the heat with my grandmother, I kept reminding myself of how much I loved that cordial, since after about three doses and long sleeps, I always got well.       

Now, when I’m picking figs, I keep reminding myself of how much almost everyone in my family loves the Fig Preserves. My husband and I just finished off our last jar, just in time for this year’s crop.

I figure it’s Arabic because my mother-in-law, Josephine, showed me how to make the recipe: ripe figs, lemon juice, lemon peel, and anise seed — no water. The lemon peel turns candied and is almost as good as the figs. 

Josephine said to cook the figs without much stirring, since you want them kept whole, and you boil gently until the juice is a “little bit syrupy.”

As I’m cooking the figs, I mentally give an approving nod to those people who so long ago came up with this recipe, that doesn’t require Sur-Jell. I also think of the people who came up with the idea of adding strawberry Jello to figs, turning it into faux strawberry jam, probably more acceptable to the Southern palate. 

Believe me, I already have people waiting in line for these preserves: all my children, Uncle Norman, and Aunt Leona have put in their orders.

“Get the jar with the most lemon peel,” my granddaughter Jessica says.

Roberta George of Valdosta is the founder of the Snake Nation Press.