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Daily Deviation
Daily Deviation
September 25, 2014
Canning Season by ejeans7 overwhelms the senses with the best kind of nostalgia: memories, families, friends, food
Featured by ShadowedAcolyte
Literature Text
Canning season is that wonderful time of year when you never have a moment to yourself - it's all four in the morning mason jar sterilizing, neighbors making coffee in your kitchen before you're even dressed because they have cabbage, too (or carrots or apples or string beans) and you've invited them over with a truck load because you know extra hands make all the difference.
It's the time of year when the kitchen is never comfortable - if the water's not on to boil, the oven is warming and full of jars, or the space around the table is all buckets and elbows, paring knives, sweaty brows and chatter.
There is never silence - even in that ten minutes of processing time, when everything stops long enough for a hurried dinner, there's the water-bath-bubbling, jar-rattling rumble of the canner, or the joyous gunshot snapping of the lids as each jar seals.
Those days are filled with wood smoke, steam and the smell of apple butter reducing in the large copper kettle that once lived with your great-grandparents on a family farm that's still drowning under twenty feet of water because a dam was built in that valley when your father was half your age.
It is memories.
It is heaven sitting at a picnic table, immersed in joy and tired.
It's knowing you could never bottle enough of this, but at least you will have food to see you through another winter.
It's the time of year when the kitchen is never comfortable - if the water's not on to boil, the oven is warming and full of jars, or the space around the table is all buckets and elbows, paring knives, sweaty brows and chatter.
There is never silence - even in that ten minutes of processing time, when everything stops long enough for a hurried dinner, there's the water-bath-bubbling, jar-rattling rumble of the canner, or the joyous gunshot snapping of the lids as each jar seals.
Those days are filled with wood smoke, steam and the smell of apple butter reducing in the large copper kettle that once lived with your great-grandparents on a family farm that's still drowning under twenty feet of water because a dam was built in that valley when your father was half your age.
It is memories.
It is heaven sitting at a picnic table, immersed in joy and tired.
It's knowing you could never bottle enough of this, but at least you will have food to see you through another winter.
Literature
Malnoir
Malnoir
It is very possible, as humans, to lose ourselves in a good book. It happens randomly, and can occur on the first page or the last, and often times breaking out of the hypnotic trance is near impossible. It’s an addiction of sorts, reading, and it’s also the greatest talent than mankind has every developed. But nowadays, as my body begins to give out from age and I find myself cooped in my apartment, reading to pass the time, I often wonder if the books can lose themselves in us. As we read them they stare back at us and watch and think and ponder and admire the human form. But we often find ourselves too enthralled to n
Literature
fabled life
i.
she talks through her wrinkles,
'i have no desire for food', she says.
i take her plate to the kitchen
noticing how the beetroot shavings bled into the skin of the chicken and brown rice.
it was blood, skin, and bone,
and the rice was a million starlike cells floating between.
this reminds me of my anatomy textbook:
we've been learning what's beneath our skin,
we learned that all cells divide. some cells often don't stop dividing.
other cells divide and stop when they should...
but not my grandmother's.
starlike, they explode, they shatter, they consume
they divide.
ii.
i want to be mad at my grandmother's cells,
but what would that do?
i
Literature
They say the one who prays
They say the one who prays receives much more
than whom we pray for, shaping what we want
to what we get. We find a way to pour
the outcomes into candle molds we can't
have fashioned for ourselves. But then we light
the wax and sniff the scent and call us blessed
by blessings in disguise. For what is right
in contexts so complex we cannot test?
For those who say that praying contradicts
free will or undercuts the will to change
injustice, fine. You have no wax, no wicks,
no blessing and no curse, you are the sage.
I pray to sculpt the candle and the mold
and scent with pity earth and heaven's hold.
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Because someone asked me what I meant when I said "canning season." We don't can like this anymore - this is mostly made up of memories of canning while still living with my dad. I'd like to get back to that way of life, though.
© 2013 - 2024 ejeans7
Comments76
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Wonderfully poetic and descriptive. I have lots of fond memories of helping my grandparents with canning produce from their gardens, and this puts those memories into words far better than I ever could.