The Jars I Canned for the Food Shelf
And the green beans went in the pressure canner. Always. My canner is an old Mirro with a weighted regulator, the kind that jiggles and rocks on top when it is up to pressure. I have had it since that extension class in 1994.
Ten pounds of pressure is right for our farm, since we sit under a thousand feet.
Quarts of green beans, twenty-five minutes once the weight starts rocking steady. Not twenty-four. Then you turn off the heat and you let it come down on its own.
Curt picked the beans. Most nights he did not get in from the field until after dark, and he would go out to the garden with a flashlight and pick until the five-gallon pail was full.
I would hear the screen door bang at ten at night, and there would be the pail on the counter. He never said a word about it.
Every lid got labeled, the same as always. What it was. The date. How it was processed. My initials. And on the applesauce, Henry’s name in the corner of the white label.
I knew Henry would never see these jars. I wrote his name anyway. My hand just did it. After about the tenth one, I stopped trying not to.
When I was done, I lined them up on the long table in the basement and counted them twice. Forty-six quarts of tomatoes. Fifty-two of green beans. Forty-two of applesauce.
Every seal was down tight. I pressed every lid with my thumb, and not one of them popped.
I stood there in the basement and looked at them, and I did not feel mad anymore. I felt like I had been to church.
We hauled them to the food shelf on the first Saturday in October. Curt packed the boxes between straw bales in the pickup bed, and we drove the twelve miles at forty miles an hour.
Barb was waiting for us at the side door. When she saw the boxes, she put both hands over her mouth.
Then she told us to bring them in before she said something she would have to repent of.
Curt carried the boxes, and I unloaded them. I put the tomatoes on the second row, on the shelf at eye level, where the cans of corn had been.
I lined them up with the labels facing out, the way I would in my own cellar.
Barb stood next to me and watched the empty wall fill up. She kept wiping her eyes with the back of her wrist.
She said it was the onions in the back room. There were no onions in the back room. I had looked.
I was on my knees setting the last box of green beans on the bottom shelf when I heard a little boy shout clear across the building.
“Mom! Mom, that’s Grandma’s applesauce!”
I knew that voice before I turned around. I would know it in a stadium.
It was Henry. He was five that summer. He was standing in the middle of the aisle in his church shirt and his rubber boots, pointing at the applesauce with his whole arm.
And at the end of the aisle, in a green volunteer apron, holding a clipboard, was Ashley.
Nobody had told me her church group had that Saturday. Nobody had told her I was coming. She had signed up in August and forgotten all about it.