Summer has been over for a little while now, but I just couldn't convince myself that fall was really in full swing... until Saturday. When Saturday started I was stubbornly stuck in summer but by the time the sun set I had embraced fall, welcoming it with a big bear hug.
Everbody has something that, for them, signals the change of the seasons. For some it might be a change in the weather, other people wait for the leaves to start changing colors, for me, one of those symbols is canning. It doesn't really feel like fall to me until I have done some canning. I think this started when I was a child, every year my mom would put up tomatoes, peaches, pears, tomatoe juice, and salsa. The house would get hot and sticky, the smells of steaming fruit would fill the house for days. Big bowls overflowing with pieces of discarded pits and peels were dumped into the garden to culivate the next year's crops.
Saturday my house was filled with familiar scents as I canned my own salsa. Lots and lots of salsa.
After hours and hours of chopping and boiling and stirring, seeing all of the jars neatly in their rows has got to be one of the most gratifying sights in the world. The popping sound the lids make as the jars seal is like sweet music to my ears. It signals that the hours of work are really coming to an end, that all of the time spent has not been in vain, that the jars can rest on our storage room shelves waiting until the day that we need to use them, and mostly that sound means to me that for the next year my family is just a little bit more self reliant.
2 comments:
Good job! That is something to be proud of! And there is nothing better than homemade salsa in my opinion. :)
Did you say homemade salsa? I might have to come over for a lesson.
I do remember the sounds of my mom canning as I was growing up but the sounds were nothing like at your house, they were more like choice words & frustration.
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