Canning Season
/imagination.
by camilleWhen I was a kid, summer was as long as a lifetime. A month could pass
without me ever knowing what day of the week it was. Time seemed to
stretch into one gigantic, lazy day of blackberry picking and crawdad hunt-
ing. My friends and I would pretty much spend our lives together, migrat-
ing back and forth between the town swimming pool and the woods, where
we would pretend to be orphans left to our own devices in the wilderness.
School was not on our minds. Our world was green grass, sunshine, and
Then August would roll around: a tragedy every time. “Already? How
can this be?” I would ask, shattered by the terrible truth that I needed a
three- ring binder and some #2 pencils. It’s not that school was a bad thing.
Summer was just so much better.
August is rarely announced to kids by a calendar. For some of my friends
it was the shiny floors and fluorescent lights of the department stores with
their back- to- school sales that brought the message. For me it was the bub-
bling canning bath and the smell of tomatoes. In my family the end of sum-
mer means the drone of our food- dehydrator is background music, and
you can’t open the fridge without huge lumpy bags of produce falling out
and clobbering your feet. Every spare half- hour goes into cutting up some-
thing to be preserved: the beans and corn to be blanched and frozen, the
cucumbers sliced and pickled, the squash frozen or dehydrated or pawned
off on a friend. And then there are the tomatoes. Pounds of them roll down
from the garden each day, staining every one of our kitchen towels with
their crimson juices. We slice little ones by the hundred and lay them out
on the stackable trays of our food- drier. We can the medium- sized ones,
listening afterward for each “ping” that tells us the jar lid has properly
sealed. The rest go into big, bubbling pots of tomato sauce.
I’m sure this sounds like a hassle and mess to those who have never