The Jars I Canned for the Food Shelf
I stood behind her with my arms folded, the way my mother stood behind me in 1995.
She checked the gasket. She checked that the vent pipe was clear by holding it up to the window.
She let it vent steam for ten minutes before she put the weight on, because the book said ten minutes and she had underlined it twice.
When it was done, she turned off the burner and sat down on the kitchen stool and folded her hands in her lap and did not touch it until the pressure was all the way down on its own.
Nick came in from the shed in the middle of it, where he had been helping his dad with the grain cart.
He stood in the kitchen doorway in his work coat and looked at his wife sitting there on the stool, waiting for a canner to cool.
He did not say anything. He just looked at me over her head, and his eyes were wet. He went back out to the shed before anybody could see, the way his father does.
Later Ashley called the extension office herself, on speaker, at my kitchen table, with a question about whether you can can pumpkin butter. The lady on the line said no, not at home, not safely, freeze it instead.
Ashley wrote that down and underlined it. Then she looked up at me with this little smile and said, “See? There are some things you’re not allowed to do.”
“I never said there weren’t, honey,” I said. “I just said green beans weren’t one of them.”
At Christmas, Henry gave me a present he had wrapped himself, with about a whole roll of tape.
It was a piece of construction paper with a white label taped to it, and my name on the label in red crayon.
Under the label, his mother had written for him, in her careful handwriting: For Grandma. So you know which one is yours.
I have it framed over the kitchen sink now, right above where I wash the jars.
The next September, Ashley and I canned together for three weekends, at my kitchen table and at hers.
She bought her own pressure canner, a new one with a dial gauge, and she took it to the extension office in town to be tested before she ever turned it on.
We put up tomatoes and green beans and applesauce, and a few pints of pickled beets for Curt.
Henry ran the Foley mill. Ava, who was four that year, was in charge of telling us every time a lid pinged.
Every lid had two sets of initials on it. M.F. and A.F. And every applesauce lid had Henry’s name on it twice, one neat and one with an H like a leaning fence post.
When we were done, we lined them up on the long table in my basement and counted them together.
Then Ashley took out her notebook and wrote a number at the top of a clean page and turned it around so I could see it.
Forty.
We loaded the first forty jars into the back of her car that same afternoon, and Henry rode along holding the box of applesauce on his lap, and we drove them to the food shelf before we put a single jar in either one of our cellars.