The Jars I Canned for the Food Shelf
Our son, Nick, called that night at his supper break. He works second shift at the tractor plant in Waterloo, and he calls me from the break room sometimes.
“Mom,” he said. “I just talked to Ashley. I didn’t know she was going to do that. I swear I didn’t know.”
“I know you didn’t, honey.”
“She told me she was going to talk to you about the canning. I thought she meant talk. I didn’t think she’d haul them off to the church in the middle of the night.”
I asked him why the church. He sighed. He said she could not put 140 quart jars in the garbage cart at the house, because it would weigh more than the truck would lift, and she did not want the neighbors to see.
“Mom, I’m going to talk to her,” he said. “This isn’t right. You worked on those for two weeks.”
“Nick, listen to me,” I said. “Don’t you two fight over me. You hear? She’s scared. She’s not mean. You go home and be kind to your wife.”
After supper, Curt and I drove back to the church with the buckets and the shovel. Jeff had left the light on over the back door for us.
We did not talk much. Curt shoveled the glass and the beans into the buckets, and I picked the big pieces out by hand with my canning gloves on, the thick ones I use to lift hot jars.
There were eleven jars that had not broken. They had landed on the soft stuff and held their seals. Curt picked one up and turned it in the light from the door and looked at me.
“These are still good,” he said.
“Not anymore,” I said. “They’ve been in a dumpster in the heat all day. I can’t tell you what’s been on them. I’m not giving those to anybody.”
So we opened them and dumped them in the bucket, too, and Curt did not argue. He knows the rule as well as I do.
When in doubt, throw it out. It was the very rule Ashley thought I did not know.
I want to tell this part honestly, because it would be easy to make myself look better than I was.
I lay awake that night, and I was not thinking kind thoughts. I was thinking about the hours.
The bushels of tomatoes I had scalded and peeled with my knuckles going raw. The beans I had snapped on the porch swing until my thumbs ached.
I was thinking that Ashley had never once asked me how I did it. Not once in six years.
She had read about it on her phone, and decided, and thrown it all away, and texted me like I was the paper boy.
My mother canned green beans in a water bath her whole life. Boiled them in the big blue enamel kettle for three hours, the way her mother did. Nobody we knew ever got sick, so nobody worried.
In 1994, I took a canning class at the extension office in town, because I had just bought my first pressure canner and I wanted to use it right.
The woman teaching it told us water-bath green beans were not safe. Not at any length of time.
I went home that night and I went down into my mother’s cellar, and I carried out every jar of her green beans, and I poured them out behind the hog house. Forty-some quarts. She found me doing it.