The Girl Really Can Can-Can!

There is something very "Little House on the Prairie" about canning. It always makes me feel connected to the ages. I grew up canning with my mom and Grandma Honey and my sister - even my brothers occasionally got dragged into the jar. I remember my sister and me standing at the sink slipping the skin off of peaches or tomatoes and making up songs to pass the time. One of our favorites was "Bubble Gum Saves Your Life" the lyrics were something about how "once I went underwater" anyway, not breathing and then blew a bubble and that is why bubble gum saves your life. I think my mom may have given us bubble gum that day to make us more agreeable to the torture of the Kerr factory line. As much as I loathed being in a hot kitchen when I would have rather been outside riding my bike or rollerskating on a perfect September day, I now love the memories I made in that same hot kitchen. I remember cutting corn off the cob with Grandma Honey whom I miss dearly. I remember my mom walking across the newspaper she had purposefully strewn across the kitchen floor in hopes that clean up would be easier - which it never seemed to be - 1000 times in one day carrying pans full of fruits or vegetables. I remember the way it felt to be standing at the kitchen sink looking out over the newly harvested fields and feeling the autumn breeze come in and give a little breath of life to that stifling hot room. I remember picking corn and beans and peas and raspberries that we would later husk, snap, shell, and wash for canning or freezing. I remember how it would go from the chilly morning to the hot sticky morning in just a matter of blinks. I remember husking corn on the side of the house with all of the brothers and seeing who could throw their husks into the slew when they were done. We even made a new doll (in the era of Cabbage Patch Kids) ours were the "Corn Husk Kids" and they all had white hair made out of silt. They were a best seller waiting to happen!

One of my more recent memories of canning comes from my first year in Philadelphia. We had moved out just a few months before canning season and I was a little homesick. One of the girls I knew had someone give her a ton of tomatoes because they knew she was a student with a big family but she didn't want to have to can them so she gave them to me. I remember very clearly standing in my little kitchen on Dows Road canning tomatoes on one of the first tolerable days of fall. The breeze was blowing through my open windows and for once was providing more than just a wave of humidity. I remember closing my eyes and thinking back to my mom's kitchen and feeling grateful for the memories I had bottled that continue to feed me even though I have opened them often. Thanks Mom, Grandma, Rhonda, and Dad and the brothers, for the lifetime of memories. I guess canning CAN be fun.

My favorite thing about this year is that I got some help from MY girls. C was a WONDERFUL help to me slipping the skin off the peaches until they were done. E stirred my jam until she smelled the peppers in it, and A took a nap - VERY HELPFUL! I'm passing the canning torch.

36 Quarts of peaches

35 pints of pepper jam

4 quarts of tomatoes

all without a garden - just wait until next year!!!