The Jars I Canned for the Food Shelf

Jeff called me at a quarter to eleven on a Tuesday, right in the middle of the lunch rush at the school kitchen, and I almost let it go to voicemail because my hands were in a pan of tater tots.

I wiped my hands on my apron and stepped out by the milk cooler.

Jeff has been the custodian at First Lutheran for nineteen years, and he does not call people at work unless something is leaking or somebody has died.

“Marlene,” he said. “I’m out back by the dumpster. I think these are yours.”

I asked him what was mine, and he was quiet for a second, which is not like Jeff. Then he said, “Your jars. A whole lot of your jars. You’d better come see, and I’m sorry.”

I told the head cook I had a family thing and I would be back in half an hour. She took one look at my face and waved me out the back door without a word.

Jeff was standing by the dumpster pad behind the fellowship hall with his push broom.

He had already swept some of it into a pile, and he leaned on the broom handle like he did not know what else to do with himself.

The dumpster lid was open. Inside, and all down the front of it, and all over the concrete pad, was the canning I had done for my son’s family over two long weekends in August.

Most of the jars had broken. Somebody had thrown them in hard, box by box, and the glass had burst against the steel and against each other.

Tomato ran down the side of the dumpster like somebody had dropped a can of red paint.

Green beans were scattered across the concrete in little wet piles. The applesauce had gone everywhere, pale and sweet, and the bees had already found it.

I knelt down and picked up a lid. It still had my handwriting on it in black marker. Tomatoes, quart, water bath 45 minutes, lemon juice, the date, and my initials, M.F..

I picked up another one. Applesauce, quart, 20 minutes, the date. And in the corner of the white label, Henry’s name in my block letters, so my grandson knows which jars are his.

“I didn’t know they were yours until I saw the writing,” Jeff said. “Somebody brought them over last night after Bible study, I think. I came out this morning and here it was.”

I counted what I could. It was all of them. Forty-six quarts of tomatoes. Fifty-two quarts of green beans.

Forty-two quarts of applesauce. One hundred and forty jars, every one I had carried in boxes into my son’s basement two weeks before.

My phone buzzed in my apron pocket while I was still kneeling there. It was a text from my daughter-in-law, Ashley.

“Marlene, I’ve been reading a lot about home canning and it isn’t safe for my kids. I got rid of the jars. Please don’t bring any more. I hope you understand.”

I read it twice. Then I put the phone back in my pocket and stood up, because my knees are fifty-seven years old and they let me know it on concrete.

I went back to the school and finished the lunch line. I scooped tater tots for two hundred and eleven children, and I smiled at every one of them, and I did not cry until I was in the pickup at a quarter past one.