Peter E. Horjus

It was easy, out of the chaos of meals, to feel that when you canned, you were making art.

More than thrift spurred me some summers to fill jars with pickles, fruit, and relishes. I was not the only one. You could walk down our alley and, through open windows, see bare-armed women sweating in kitchens, muscles popping up as they lifted hot jars out of the canning kettle, and you could smell the sharp vinegar and deep sweet fruit. These were women with whom I picked huckleberries along rivers and peaches in nearby orchards. We shared recipes for chow-chow and blueberry conserve and stood in each other's pantries, gazing up at jars packed with dilled beans and Queen Anne cherries. We smiled and shyly touched each other's elbows with fingertips and said to each other about our canning what we said about our children, "How pretty, how pretty."

Always high summer, canning season was. Noon heat all day. Sky molten blue. Early morning you clipped the heavy laundry on the clothesline. Windless and so still the wind was (no wind flapping the big husband shirts or flowered little girls skirts) you believed you could stand by the garden and hear the corn grow. The sound was a dry skimming swoosh like satin ballet slippers sliding across waxed floors. You admired the blooming potatoes and the carrots that were shoving up their feathery greens. You stopped to pluck a tenacious weed, then brushed aside humming flies and went inside, slamming the screen door as you liked to do, you were a wife and a mother, this was your house. You walk barefoot across still-cool kitchen tiles. Watched the goldfish swimming languidly in their warm water. Turned down the sound on the television, whose black-and-white screen Captain Kangaroo’s face filled. You made potato salad studded with fat black olives and put it away for dinner and then daubed pink calamine on the children’s mosquito bites.

You would want to make something beautiful that would last. To retrieve something enduring from a hot day otherwise lost to children’s ravenous need and many small failures. You wanted to save something. And it always seemed like magic, canning did. You packed hot sterilized jars with smaller-than-golf-ball purplish-red beets, added bay leaf, a few onion rings, peeled garlic cloves and poured in pungent pickling syrup. Presto-change-o, six months, nine months later, you opened the jar and spooned out the very same baby beets you popped into that jar the summer previous. Time — for the beets — had stopped.

It was easy, out of the chaos of meals (which took hours to prepare and minutes to eat) to feel that when you canned, you were making art. Placing, as Wallace Stevens would have it, “a jar in Tennessee.” Canned goods were to dinner what poetry was to prose and pickled beets one of the prettiest canning products. The bright red pigments, betacyanin and betaxanthin, that color the beet, bleed out a rich wine red into the pickling liquid. My jars of pickled beets had about them such a stained glass window, ecclesiastic radiance that I used to say I wouldn’t be surprised to find creatures from a tiny creche scene rise up, and walk out of the jar.

Canning (or “putting-up,” as our grandmothers called it) garden and orchard produce is also a way of packing your own time capsule. In summer you filled jars with peaches and nubby warted pickles, and in winter, when you opened those jars, it all came back. There was the Saturday morning you set the plastic portable Zenith in the niche of a tree’s trunk and teetered high on ladders to reach in among soft leaves for the peaches (which were fuzzy as a newborn and ruddy and golden). You cried as you sang along with Janis Joplin singing, in her lost nasal whine, “Little Girl Blue.” There was the weekday afternoon when the children went to the pool and your husband came home early and you made love — then you got up from the bed and canned topless, sweat tickling down your spine into the small of your back, the canning kettle steaming, the filled jars clattering in bubbling water, and you wondering who you would be when you turned 30, wondering if you would live to 40 and have gray hair. You were not just making pickles or jam, you were making a memory. You were canning days that otherwise got lost, So that when winter’s blossom-sized flakes drifted down on bare trees and you put pickles out onto the table or spread peach jam across a muffin, you were opening a photograph album. You were eating memory.

I did turn 40. Making pickled peaches, now, provoked two memories. One comes in snapshots of my maternal grandmother, who first fed me pickled peaches and whom I watched make them and whose recipe I use.

The second memory shows up in my mind as a movie. The pickled peaches aren’t the movie’s star, a dog is. Back when our older daughter Rebecca was three, nothing would do but she have a black miniature poodle. We got the poodle, Rebecca named her Cher. Time passed, Cher produced several litters of puppies. Then hit dog middle age and began to run at fat. At her heaviest, she weighed in at 34 pounds. Friends would blame us for overfeeding her, and we’d point to our dachshund, who all his life remained slim as the Duke of Windor (the one who gave up his throne for love of a woman).

Every once in a while when I was looking for credit card slips for the tax accountant or the children’s vaccination cards, I’d run across Cher’s AKC papers. I’d stand by the rolltop desk and re-read the papers, thinking that each time that maybe there’d been an error, maybe she wasn’t a miniature.

Three or four times a year we’d take Cher out to the vet — Larry — to get her toenails clipped and to be bathed and trimmed. Larry would always say, “Goddam, that dog’s going to drop dead any day.” And he’d hand us another hectographed copy of his diet for dogs, and we’d read its purple type and go buy the cans of Campbell’s beef and vegetable soup Larry prescribed.

And when we got Cher home, a top-knot bobbing above her forehead, hair at the end of her stub tail shaped into a bill, and a ridge of her astrakhan-like fur encircling each ankle, it wasn't easy to keep from laughing. Her head was tiny and her muzzle delicate. Her trunk, of course, was massive. Inevitably one of us would said it: "She looks like a nail keg on legs." Cher would hang her head and slink off, tail down, to her basket and we would feel, as we should have, ashamed.

The Campbell’s soup diets never lasted long. All night, Cher would be up and down. We’d hear her in the kitchen. She’d cry, the same pitiable whimpers that emerged when she delivered pups. After several years of off and on of trying Larry’s dog diet, we decided that these cutbacks only increased her appetite. The diets made her omnivorous. Anything available she gobbled, whether she was hungry or not. A mother visited with her infant, Cher grabbed the baby’s bottle, bit the nipple, lapped up the milk. When we hid the children’s Easter eggs if we didn’t lock Cher in the house, she’d find every egg and eat it. In summer, she’d wander out to the garden and pick off the ripe cherry tomatoes.

One of the first things you do when you can peaches is to pour boiling water over the fruit to loosen the fuzzy peach skin and then plunge the fruit into cold water and slip the skin off one after another peach until all the peaches were naked. Slipping the skins, what we — Rebecca and her little sister Sarah and I — used to end up with was a plastic pail filled with peach skins that one of us would carry out back to the mulch pile. Inevitably, Cher would stick her delicate muzzle right into that pile and gobble up peach peelings. Also tomato skins, cucumber peels, the stem ends snapped off green beans.

Cher hung around the kitchen. Hot days she panted heavily, saliva dripping off her pink tongue. When we made pickled peaches, her corkscrew curly black fur smelled for days, the children would complain that they smelled like pickles and that when we canned, their bangs were always sticky.

Cher was 13 when she dies (so much for Larry the Vet’s prophecy of early death!). It was a summer Sunday afternoon. I’d been playing ball-toss with Cher out in the front yard while Rebecca filled the back seat of the Mazda with empty pop bottles she planned to return to the grocery store ( she’d just gotten her license and was suddenly willing to do any chore that involved driving). I patted Cher’s head, which by then had tufts of white hair, as did her muzzle, and went inside to start dinner. Rebecca telephoned a friend to ask if he’d like to go to Safeway with her, they talked awhile. Rebecca plucked the car keys off the dowel in the laundry room, kissed me, sailed out the house. Seconds later, she screamed: a shriek pitched so high, conveying such grief, that it abraded the very air that carried it. Cher was in the car’s back seat, dead. I think that the day Cher died marked for Rebecca the end of childhood.

Last fall I was visiting Rebecca. She led me to her pantry, opened the door, and showed me shelves on which she lined up pickled beets (my recipe, taken from Adelle Davis’s Let’s Cook It Right), dilled green beans and dilled okra pods, mint pears and lime pears (from her grandfather’s recipe), and peaches and black cherry preserves and apple butter. She toasted English muffins, and we sat at her kitchen table and spread butter and the black cherry preserves onto the steaming muffins. The butter melted down into the bread’s porous web, and the dark cherries, surrounded by a pool of their own syrup, glimmered. The taste was that paradisiacal amalgam of salty butter, yeasty muffin, and sweet-tart cherry.

Out Rebecca’s kitchen window we could see her German shepherd asleep under the weeping willow. We talked about Cher> We tried to remember what it was Rebecca used to say when Cher wagged her stub tail. “It was tut,” Rebecca laughed. “I’d say, “Cher is tutting her tail.’” I asked if she thought my feeling correct, that the day Cher died marked for her the end of childhood. She said yes, and then her cheeks colored pink with embarrassment, She said, “Lots of things began to change, about that time.” And I knew she was blushing because she meant me. I changed.

Because at about that same time, the year Cher died, many women my age felt the world we’d made — children and gardens and kitchen -- wearing thin, wearing out. The household arts appeared trivial to us, and we began to see grandmothers and mothers only as who they didn’t become, what they didn’t accomplish. We began to mourn what we felt were these women’s unlived shadow selves. We said, “If she hadn’t spent all that time canning (or knitting or patching quilts or sewing our dressed) she might have been an engineer, a lawyer, senator, an artist, a doctor.” We lamented that she -- they -- had been only our mothers.

Mourning who these women did not become, we tended to forget to celebrate who they were and what they did do. We forgot the backyard gardens, rows and rows often scratched out of the poorest soils that yielded meals that made us grow strong and bouquets that taught eyes and noses what beauty could be. We forgot the cunning thrift that turned scraps into rag rugs and quilts or gathered buckets of bruised windfall apples and stewed them down to jelly. Certainly, we did not allow ourselves to consider that both the process of brining pickles and the jar of pickles itself might have given pleasure to our grandmothers and mothers.

For years I’d given up canning. I said I didn’t have time. But most of all, canning (or sewing, raising vegetables, arranging flowers, knitting) in this new world of women engineers and doctors and bus drivers seemed to be a waste of my time. I told myself, “I could be making money.” Seeing Rebecca’s jars made me want to pickle peaches again. I went to the hardware store and bought a canning kettle and a box of wide-mouthed Kerr canning jars and then to a farmer’s market and chose firm peaches, one by one, until I had a basketful. Standing in my kitchen, feeling somehow shy and abashed, as if I were again a new bride, I dipped the fruit in hot water and slipped away the fuzzy peach skins. I was surprised how much my hands remembered.