This is not a Betty Crocker-endorsed operation

The only simple explanation I can find for my recent 24-hour flurry of homemaking activity is that the high fever I had a month ago must've caused an important part of my brain to melt, and I was having some kind of delayed seizure-like spastic fit of Betty Crocker-y.

Why else, after half of a lifetime of avoiding this particular domestic pastime, would I suddenly construct my own homemade chokecherry syrup using only my own bare hands and a few rudimentary kitchen tools.

It's not normal.

Normally, I would pick the chokecherries then give them away to someone who would make use of them in a productive and homely fashion. And they would do this someplace else, where I neither had to watch nor participate.

No, actually, that's only normal on lucky years. Normally the birds eat 99.62 percent of all my chokecherries out of spite, leaving only about 20.23 berries per bush for human consumption.

Yes, I know, little birdies need to eat at least half their body weight in food every day, so you're probably thinking that the birds need the berries to survive. Whatever.

The only real use I see the birds getting out of eating the berries is the manufacture and distribution of purple poo with which they bomb my car.

This year, as happens some years, the overall drought conditions of the state drove the songbirds, and their perching brethren, to other regions soon after their babes hatched and learned to fly, leaving me with full bushes of berries ... and a not-purple car.

So one night, the night my seizure began, I wrangled my husband and my dog, and we picked a few gallons of chokecherries.

It didn't become obvious that I was not myself until the next morning when I researched how to process the berries ... and then actually did it.

I put the chokecherries into a large pot with water and boiled them. How weird is that?

When I returned home from work that afternoon, I squished the boiled berries to a pulp and strained them. It took a long time using my makeshift tools, so this was obviously a serious illness.

It continued with another bout of research for recipes, both Internet- and book-based, along with a little historical family recipe input that recommended first making crabapple juice to mix with the chokecherry juices. Or alternately using prune juice.

Neither of which was going to happen. A brain seizure can only do so much to your judgment.

All of this was followed by a conference with my husband and a trip to town (though I shouldn't have been driving with a melted brain) to buy two ingredients (neither of which was prune juice).

With all ingredients in order, it happened. Chokecherry syrup bubbled forth from my kitchen, like an elixir of life. This syrup, if I do say so myself (and I do), is the most beautiful and tasty chokecherry treat I have ever beheld or consumed on pancakes. And it's not just the seizure talking.

Now, though, I'm totally over the fit of cookery. In fact, that ended before I could dare to properly can the syrup. In desperation, I went modern and put all the extra syrup into Ziplock baggies and threw it in the freezer for safekeeping.

I have to admit that I want to do it again next year, and I'm sure I want to take the giant leap forward to actually can the extra syrup. It's like planning ahead to have a double aneurysm.

(FYI, DIYers, chokecherry syrup does not freeze solid, even in the deep freeze. It's weird at http://viewnorth40.wordpress.com.)