Today was a day with not one "anything" on my calendar. There were tomatoes calling from the porch and while I listened to Andrea Mitchell on my Alexa speaker and started the satisfying process of canning tomatoes. I started with the quick dip in boiling water and then plunging into the icy cold to take off the skins. Then I cut out the cores (there was not one blemish on any of the tomatoes, Ada's tomatoes are the best) and started cooking them up. Meanwhile jars were washed, lids and rings in the hot water, and my favorite glass funnel ready to fill the jars. The kosher salt and lemon juice waiting.
I don't remember if I really watched my great grandmothers can food. I do remember watching them open the jars that they were using for a meal. There were always canned pickles and maybe pickled watermelon rinds at most if not all meals. I remember the sauerkraut crock at the bottom of the very small steps down to the cellar.
"Putting food up" was something that I had earned some muscle memory as a little girl and at 22 when we harvested our first "back to the lander" garden I put that memory to use. I canned tomatoes, there were rows and rows of tomatoes in the garden (way to many) and then there were rows and rows of canned tomatoes, tomato juice, tomato sauce. I canned green beans, tiny small potatoes, creamed corn, lots of pickles along with lots of fruit, jams and jellies. I was a canning machine and I found every part of the process so satisfying and rewarding.
There were many decades between then and now where I did little or no canning. Today was a canning day, and tomorrow will be as well. I will put the jars in my little basement pantry once they are cooled and I have put their labels on. Sometime this winter I will open up the jar and make a pasta sauce or a soup and I will remember about this cloudy late summer day. I might or I might not remember that young girl who channeled her great grandmother's and then canned and canned and put up food for the whole year. That girl and Mary Emma and Alta Effa were having lots of fun today!
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