Yes We Can

I spent the majority of Sunday canning tomatoes.

It’s that time of year, my friends. The leaves on the trees aren’t as green as they were, the flowers aren’t as happy as they used to be, the vegetables have matured and are begging to be picked.

Next stop: Autumn.

And you know what that means, don’t you: Several lugs of tomatoes and spending the afternoon with a knife in one hand and a hot tomato in the other.

It’s a symbolic thing – not the knife, of course, nor the tomato (although so many things can be remedied with a good tomato). The move from one season to another requires a list of things that need to be readied: the yard, the car, the windows, the closet – and the pantry.

Canning is a shift in thinking, one eye on the next season with my feet in the current one. It requires careful attention to detail now so that there will be something for the future. If the jar isn’t clean, that quart is going to be bad. If you didn’t wipe the rim of the jar, the seal may fail.

And don’t you hate it when your seal fails?

So 15 quarts, four pints, three random turnips from my sister and a jar of canned beets from my mother, we’re one step closer to saying good-bye to summer and hello to fall.

I don’t make the rules. I just live by them.

Hope you’ve cleaned your jars.