The Jars I Canned for the Food Shelf
She looked at the shelf. Then she looked at me, down on my knees with a box of green beans. Then she looked at the young mother standing beside her with a shopping cart.
The young mother had a little girl on her hip, about two, with a runny nose and a pink coat that was too big for her.
She was taking two jars of my applesauce off the shelf and setting them in her cart, very carefully, like they might break.
Henry ran to me. He threw his arms around my neck and nearly knocked me into the green beans. I held on to him longer than he wanted me to.
“Grandma,” he said into my ear, “why is your applesauce here?”
I did not know what to tell him. So I told him the truth, the size a five-year-old can carry. “Because some families don’t have any applesauce,” I said. “So I made some for them.”
He thought about that. He looked over at the little girl in the pink coat. Then he said, “Does she get a label with my name on it, too?”
“Yes, baby,” I said. “Every one of them has a name on it.”
“Good,” he said. “Then she’ll know which one is hers.”
Ashley walked down the aisle toward us. She did not hurry. She set her clipboard on the shelf next to the tomatoes.
Then she picked up one of my jars and turned the lid toward the window, and read my handwriting out loud, very quietly.
“Tomatoes. Quart. Water bath, forty-five minutes. Lemon juice. September twentieth. M.F.”
She set it down. She picked up a jar of green beans and read that one, too. “Pressure canned. Ten pounds. Twenty-five minutes.”
She stood there with the jar in her hands. I got up off my knees, slowly, because of the concrete.
Curt had come in from the truck with the last box, and he stopped in the doorway and did not come any closer. He knew.
I braced myself. I thought she was going to say I had no business giving home-canned food to strangers.
I thought she was going to say it in front of Barb and the young mother and her whole church group.
Ashley opened her mouth and then shut it again. Her chin was shaking. Then she said, “Marlene, what does the lemon juice do?”
I looked at her. She was not being smart. She was asking.
“It makes the tomatoes acid enough,” I said. “The new tomatoes aren’t as acid as the old ones. So you add it, and then the water bath is enough. Two tablespoons a quart.”
“And the beans go in the pressure one,” she said, “because they don’t have any acid at all.”
“That’s right,” I said. “Beans, corn, carrots, anything like that. Pressure canner, every time. There’s no other safe way to do it at home.”
She nodded. She was holding the jar of beans against her apron, against her stomach, the way you would hold a baby.
Then she said the thing I had never in six years thought I would hear Ashley Fritz say.
“Would you teach me? The right way. The way it says in the book.”
Barb took the young mother and the little girl in the pink coat up to the front table, very smoothly, like she had planned it.
Henry went with them, because Barb has a jar of suckers up there. Curt went back out to the truck.