I think this has become one of my favorite sights: the sunlight in the eastern window, just barely illuminating a row of jars of new food.
Yesterday, N-son and I spent 4 hours "putting up" tomatoes. We canned 28 quarts of tomatoes and 4 more quarts of tomato juice. And this morning I rose to test the lids, and discovered happily that all-but-one of the jars sealed properly.
There's a word -- liminal -- that I've kind of fallen in love with. It means, "relating to a transitional or initial stage of a process; occupying a position at, or on both sides of, a boundary or threshold". Sunrise over canning jars is a liminal moment: a threshold between yesterday's hot, messy work and the comfort of having summer tomatoes in my winter basement. And canning jars full of tomatoes, when backlit by the rising sun, are beautiful.
At a pre-semester gathering last week, a colleague of mine picked my brain about trash. (That happens a lot nowadays). She, like many other people, lamented the recent changes in recycling rules and said she wants to produce less trash, but "I'd have to totally change how I shop". She buys bulk food at Costco, because that's how she manages to afford organic food for her family. But apples come packaged in plastic containers that are almost like egg cartons, keeping each piece of fruit isolated from the others. So much plastic, she frets, and now she can't dump that container in her green recycling bin. But what choices are there?
Of course, she's right that if she wants to do it differently, she'd have to totally change how she shops. For me, this change came over the course of many years, and by now the idea of buying apples out of season seems like a bizarre, almost alien, practice. Of course I buy apples from an orchard in October and then can applesauce. (Cherries in June; peaches in August). I have fresh fruit in the summer, or when scavenged from catered events my college holds, and the rest of the time I eat fruit from the basement or not at all. This is such a different way of thinking, of living in the world.
As an example of a different way of thinking, here are some "notes to self" that I'm gathering as the sun rises over my tomatoes. Other people make shopping lists for their next trip to the grocery store, but I'm making lists for next August:
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| Tomatoes in the dark. |
There's a word -- liminal -- that I've kind of fallen in love with. It means, "relating to a transitional or initial stage of a process; occupying a position at, or on both sides of, a boundary or threshold". Sunrise over canning jars is a liminal moment: a threshold between yesterday's hot, messy work and the comfort of having summer tomatoes in my winter basement. And canning jars full of tomatoes, when backlit by the rising sun, are beautiful.
At a pre-semester gathering last week, a colleague of mine picked my brain about trash. (That happens a lot nowadays). She, like many other people, lamented the recent changes in recycling rules and said she wants to produce less trash, but "I'd have to totally change how I shop". She buys bulk food at Costco, because that's how she manages to afford organic food for her family. But apples come packaged in plastic containers that are almost like egg cartons, keeping each piece of fruit isolated from the others. So much plastic, she frets, and now she can't dump that container in her green recycling bin. But what choices are there?
Of course, she's right that if she wants to do it differently, she'd have to totally change how she shops. For me, this change came over the course of many years, and by now the idea of buying apples out of season seems like a bizarre, almost alien, practice. Of course I buy apples from an orchard in October and then can applesauce. (Cherries in June; peaches in August). I have fresh fruit in the summer, or when scavenged from catered events my college holds, and the rest of the time I eat fruit from the basement or not at all. This is such a different way of thinking, of living in the world.
As an example of a different way of thinking, here are some "notes to self" that I'm gathering as the sun rises over my tomatoes. Other people make shopping lists for their next trip to the grocery store, but I'm making lists for next August:
- Canning tomatoes and not tomato sauce goes a lot faster. Continue this practice?
- I got two buckets of Roma tomatoes. This last year, though, we ran out of jars of tomato stuff in May; next summer should I get three buckets? Or with N-son moving out to go to school, will two still be enough? Not sure.
- We spent two hours actively chopping, and about a half-hour cleaning; the other hour-and-half was just processing time.
- When I let N-son pick the music we listen to, he picks Reba McIntyre, same as last year. Apparently, she writes good canning music.
- If I get more tomatoes next year, especially if N-son isn't around, I'll need to budget more than 4 hours for canning.
This is a hugely different kind of thinking than my colleague does, and for a very small difference in trash output. (In fact, metal tomato cans and glass jars are still recycle-able in our area, so this is really just a difference in how much we'd recycle). And I don't know if it's a huge difference in cost -- our 32 quarts of tomato stuff cost $24, plus gas/energy expenses.
My colleague gets the convenience of not having to spend a day each summer devoted to tomatoes, and another day in the fall devoted to apples. For me, I get the convenience of not needing to grocery shop weekly during the cold and paper-work-intense winter months. Not a better life necessarily, but certainly a different one.
But seeing the sun rise over my tomatoes . . . well, that's a moment to enjoy.
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