Summer of 2000, Ooltewah, Tennessee

By Sherry Poff

I stand in my kitchen, cutting up tomatoes, following my more experienced neighbor’s instructions and leaning on the memory of my mother.

Already this year, I have made blackberry jam and peach preserves. Suddenly, I remember a clever line from my family’s past: “What do you do with all these green beans you’ve planted?”

“Well,” answers the old farmer, “We eat what we can. And what we can’t, we can.”

I smile as red wedges fill the stainless-steel pot, and juice runs down my hand, stinging a little in the blackberry scratches.

Suddenly, I am 6 years old, playing in the backyard while my mom cans tomatoes. She is singing an old hymn as she adjusts the jars in the large canner that sits over a fire surrounded by stones. Her slender form leans over the boiling water, and dark hair curls around her tanned face as she uses a large spoon to nudge the jars into position.

Most of them are pint-size canning jars, the word Mason standing out in raised letters across the front. We emptied these jars back in the spring, using the green beans that filled them alongside fried chicken for a Sunday dinner. I know that Mom has bought new rings to cap the jars, so they’ll stay sealed. But some of the containers in the canner look like renegades. Odd shapes and sizes, bits of their labels still clinging to the sides, I know they used to hold pickles and jelly from the store.

“I just can’t bring myself to throw away a good jar,” I hear my mom say, squeezing her hand through the narrow opening to scrape out the last remnants of grape jelly. “When I was growing up, it was so hard to get enough to can with. These jars have good lids. We can use them again.”

I find the skins and scraps of tomatoes that Mom has thrown out, and she gives me some little jars to play with. I busy myself with copying her actions and hum contentedly along with her: “What a friend we have in Jesus, all our sins and griefs to bear.”

My mother was born in March of 1929, just seven months before the stock market crash that officially started the decade-long Great Depression. She was the oldest of 10 children, most of whom came along before good times returned to Appalachia.

Because her family lived on a farm, they had food during those difficult years, but it didn’t come without hard work. The children all learned early how to hoe corn and pick green beans, when to dig potatoes and pull onions. Her dad worked in timber and usually walked several miles a day. Sometimes he would stop at a small grocery store on his way home.

“When he brought home a box of crackers,” Mom remembered, “we’d have vegetable soup for supper. That was a real treat. Once in a while, he would have enough money for a couple pints of ice cream.” She pauses, looking into the distance. “He used to run home to get there before the ice cream melted.”

At the end of our long, hot summer day, several jars of bright tomatoes sit cooling in the kitchen. Mom stirs the ashes out back to make sure the fire is completely out. She pours the water, now just tepid, over marigolds and dahlias, lingering to watch it soak into the soil.

As we wash up in the kitchen, we hear the lids on the jars popping one by one, sealing their contents until someday next winter, when we will make a pot of soup or stir the tomatoes into cooked macaroni. I think about the day I will be big enough to build the fire and lower the rack of jars into the boiling water for real.

But now, in my own kitchen, my fire is the electric range. I spoon hot tomatoes into small containers, listening to NPR on the radio and shaking my hair out of my face. I pour boiling water over the lids in the sink, lift them out with tongs, and, using a clean dish towel, tighten them onto the jars before lowering them with a rubber-coated jar wrench into the bubbling water, filling a Dutch oven on the back of my stove. While they process, I clean up the mess I have made, wiping tomato juice off the countertops and floor.

After the required 10 minutes in the boiling water, the jars stop jiggling when I turn off the heat. I lift them out carefully and line them up on the counter to cool. After a while, I take the Dutch oven outside and pour the water over impatiens and coleuses. Coming back into the kitchen, I smile as I hear the lids begin to seal one by one, preserving the contents until I am ready to make chili or vegetable soup.

Before going to bed that night, I put away my gleaming jars of tomatoes. I smile as I see my summer’s work lined up on the shelf: blackberries, peaches and tomatoes in pickle and peanut butter jars.

These jars have good lids, I think. We can use them again.

Sherry Poff grew up in southern West Virginia. She now teaches and writes in and around Chattanooga, Tennessee.

Posted by Elizabeth Armstrong Moore on Monday, August 6th, 2007 | Email This Post

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