"Canning is thrift"

There are plums on the tree this summer, but they're high up.  Good thing we have that handy dandy fruit-picker-on-a pole-contraption.   There aren't nearly as many as last year and they're smaller, but it looks like enough to make a few batches of plum chutney.


Maybe the tree is just plum-tuckered out like me this summer.  More likely, it bloomed a few weeks too early (warm winter) then the weather turned cold and damp and the bees went back to bed. No pollinators, no fruit.

 2014

The low-hanging bounty over the sidewalk caused a neighborhood feeding frenzy last August.  Branches were broken off and the fence damaged. Oh well, I won't miss that. 

But I will miss those once-in-a-lifetime plums. We picked tub after tub, literally hundreds of pounds. We gave many away, and ate as many as humanly possible. I canned several dozen pints and made plum chutney from a new recipe, which aged beautifully and turned out to be a real hit at Christmas.

Here's a favorite poem by Marge Piercy. I first read her work when I was in college in the 1970's and it made a big impact on me at the time. I still revisit her poems when I'm looking for some familiar comfort or a just reminder of what's important.

Canning

We pour a mild drink each,
turn on the record player,
Beethoven perhaps or Vivaldi,
opera sometimes, and then together
in the steamy kitchen we put up
tomatoes, peaches, grapes, pears.
Each fruit has a different
ritual: popping the grapes
out of the skins like little
eyeballs, slipping the fuzz
from the peaches and seeing
the blush painted on the flesh beneath.
It is part game: What shall
we magic wand this into?
Peach conserve, chutney, jam,
brandied peaches. Tomatoes
turn juice, sauce hot or mild
or spicy, canned, ketchup.
Vinegars, brandies, treats
for the winter: pleasure
deferred. Canning is thrift
itself in sensual form,
surplus made beautiful, light
and heat caught in a jar.
I find my mother sometimes
issuing from the steam, aproned,
red faced, her hair up in a net.
Since her death we meet usually
in garden or kitchen. Ghosts
come reliably to savors, I learn.
In the garden your ashes,
in the kitchen your knowledge.
Little enough we can save
from the furnace of the sun
while the bones grow brittle as paper
and the hair itself turns ashen.
But what we can put by, we do
with gaiety and invention
while the music laps round us
like dancing light, but Mother,
this pleasure is only deferred.
We eat it all before it spoils.