Please visit breakerwhiskey.com for more information or to send a message to Whiskey's radio. Breaker Whiskey is an Atypical Artists production created by Lauren Shippen. If you'd like to support the show, please visit patreon.com/breakerwhiskey. As a patron, you will also receive each week's episodes as one longer episode every Monday. ------ [TRANSCRIPT] [click, static] Another gas station today, right over the border in Wyoming and they had this tiny little buffalo toy at the counter. He’s sitting on my dashboard now, watching over the road as I drive. Maybe there’s something perversely ironic about that. The image of a buffalo being forced to watch a paved road pass underneath him when the road’s very existence is part of the reason that he and all of his brethren got decimated in the first place. Maybe I’m overthinking it. [click, static] My dad used to get me all these things like this from truck stops along his route, stuff like this little buffalo. Some kind of tchotchke—a keychain, a pen, a magnet. Anything that had the name of a city or the image of a monument on it. I loved all of those souvenirs, would keep them in a row on top of my dresser like some kind of shrine to the great American road trip. [click, static] Every trip he always made he brought one of those things back for me. And when he could—when the season was right—he would bring back a jar of homemade jam for my mom. He would never buy it at a store or anything like that—only ever from a roadside stand. So it had to be summer, usually, and he had to happen to pass one. And then...well, I think he’d probably spend twenty minutes picking out exactly which jar he wanted to get her, because he’d only ever bring one back, but he’d tell us all about the farmer who sold it to him and the other types they had. You know, he’d talk to the farmer for a while, ask them what their speciality was, if there was a jam they liked best, or if they had any fruit varieties that they’d come up with themselves. The weirder, the better. The more regional, the better. Any time dad came home with a jar of jam it was like a little holiday—we’d spread it over toast for dessert or sometimes we’d just eat it straight from the jar. [click, static] God, it all sounds so provincial. Not that that’s...bad, but you’d think I’d grown up at the turn of the century, not the forties. But that was the thing about rural living, I guess. And I think—well, during the war, my parents got used to austerity. So even when it was all over and my dad went back to driving his usual route and not delivering supplies for the military, there was still the sense that every bit of sugar or fresh fruit was a luxury. Maybe that’s why I’ve never really needed very much to be content. [click, static] My mom loved jam—would make it herself every late spring from the big blackberry bushes we had behind our house. She’d experiment with different kinds too—the classic sweet blackberry jam, savory, spicy blackberry jams that we’d put on toast with cheese, blackberry jam mixed with vinegar in one of her few completely failed attempts. From late May through all of June, our house would smell like blackberries. I don’t really like blackberries anymore. Just the smell of them makes something inside me ache. Harry... [click, static] Harry stopped growing them in our garden after the first year. I think, somehow, she knew. [click, static]