An old ladys ramblings

It's canning time. and I'm not canning. It seems unbelievable. All my life I use August and September to can. And this year I have canned nothing. I do plan on doing salsa but thats it.

I keep feeling like i need to be canning peaches. But somehow I cant get the energy or the zest for it! So instead of actually doing the canning I'm going to give you a trip down memory lane.

When I was a girl we canned 200 quarts of peaches every year along with 200 quarts of pears, 200 of cherries and about 100 of these awful, slimy, boiled plums! Blech! But the plums grew on our place so anything edible was canned, frozen or dried for winter.

We'd sit on the old back porch and peel the peaches. In later years that porch was torn off. The new porch never was quite the same feel as that sloping ,rickety, old thing that was there most of my growing up years. We girls would sing, and tell stories to pass the time. Half the time we'd make up songs and pretend we were cutting a record. Yep, it was records then. No CD's.

Our storytelling made the work go easier but not faster! We were the pokiest kids! Pop was forever bemoaning the fact. Mom, however, hardly seemed to care. Pop was all about efficiency. Mom just wanted the work done however we could get it done.

Many long fall days were spent in that back porch or under the weeping birch in our yard. There we would snap beans, shuck the corn and whatever else needed done. Two copper boilers ran all night and all day. A copper boiler could hold 16 one quart jars and 11 two jars.

We'd put the canners of beans on and then go to bed. One of us would then wake up three hours later and switch out the canners. This would go on all night. In the morning the snapping of the beans and the canning of the fruit picked up again. All through the crisp fall days the canners bubbled on the stove.

The East wind blew night and day during the late Indian summers. With it came the heat. Pop never let us forget what the weather was doing. We didn't have a TV or a radio and yet Pop could predict the weather with great accuracy. First thing in the morning he'd come downstairs and tap the barometer. "Kids," he'd bellow, " I want those doors kept closed today. The barometer is stayin' high. The east winds a blowin' and it's gonna be a hot one." No one really listened. There were nine of us for heavens sake. How were we going to manage to keep all the doors shut?

In the winter he'd thump the barometer and declare a storm. "Kids", he'd bellow, "The barometers droppin'. The east wind is blowin' and it's gonna be a cold one." You see, the same east wind that brought the dry heat to the mountain in the summer also brought freezing cold in the winter.

We hated the cold. Our water pipes would freeze and as the water gushed out it would freeze; right there in our kitchen. So much water would freeze that it would push the old metal sink cabinet right out from the wall. Our perfume would freeze in it's bottles upstairs. Snow would drift in under the windows and lay in white gauze under every window pane.

At night the East wind would blow and the entire house would rock. Mom told us when we were older that some nights she would lie awake praying that the house would stand. It was an old three story farmhouse built at the turn of the century. It's foundation was cardboard boxes filled with huge stones! No lie. The wall leaned out so badly that finally Pop took an old logging chain and stretched it across the ceiling in the upstairs hall. He put a winch on it and about once every year he would have to crank that winch a turn to pull the walls back in!

Windows were lined with masking tape. Some windows were totally covered in cardboard as there was no money for new ones. All the doors had rugs shoved under them to keep the wind out. In the winter we would all move downstairs and sleep on the living room floor.

The old wood stove couldn't heat the upstairs since there were no vents in the ceilings. When we had to run upstairs for something it was a mad dash up into the freezing wasteland; it was so cold up there we could see our breath in the air.

In the morning we opened the warming oven doors on the old wood cookstove and mom would set the little boys up there in their sleepered footie jammies and let them dangle their feet over the wood stove to warm their toes while Pop got the thing fired up. Do you see now how important it was to make wood all summer?

It was times like these, my friends, that made the memories I now cherish. But it was also those hard times that leave me feeling reluctant to begin canning. It's a huge amount of work. And today as I sit in my house in the suburbs enjoying a middle class life, the senses awaken to the east wind blowing through my apple trees. I feel the call of youth. I smell the wood fires and hear the leaves rustling.

I smell the vinegar from the pickles and all the spices. It stirs in my soul and makes me restless. But alas, I'm too worn out to do any canning or pickling! Today I will return in memory to that old back porch. But thats what canning will remain for me this year...a memory. I'm just too tired.