I 
I 
I 
I 
I
I
I
AustinMama offers up some Daddy props.
- Robert A. Heinlein
Canning
It’s the harvest season again. A wee nip of autumn underscores the summer breezes, store windows are full of back to school banners, and vacation bills are creating their normal crop of temporary scarcity. Janice and I are still swapping occasional opportunities to sleep in, but we know those mornings are numbered. The range of finished projects and household details is measured against those that must needs wait another year, and the lazy pace of mostly unplanned days lingers just a bit longer.
This is a time to celebrate. For the first year since the move, we’ve sculpted the garden into something like the shape we want it, and it’s yielding bounty: fresh herbs, salad, green beans and cucumbers, green tomatoes teasingly glinting orange, and a tiny melon currently no larger than a grape. None of this means a whole lot to the house financially, but the psychological value is enormous. I have the fondest memories of eating fresh homegrown tomatoes on the spot in my childhood garden, and surely nothing tastes as sweet. Moreover, these are the only produce in our larder than I can genuinely guarantee are 100% organic, since they miraculously sprouted from seeds I saw my beloved wife stick in the ground, and they’ve fed on nothing but water and sunlight since. It’s significant that Janice’s were the fingers thrusting into the dirt on that occasion, because I was never much of a gardener. My earliest abortive attempts to grow plants were disastrous, and by the age of twenty I was pretty much convinced my mother’s green thumb had skipped a generation and left me a black one in its stead. But today, in reflecting on it, I wonder if that’s entirely true.
I’ve added a lot of skills to my repertoire in a few years of parenting, and I can certainly number among them a greater ability to remember what needs regular tending to and some of the patience it takes to bring a crop to fruition. Parenting, like an association with other growing things, tends to teach one to take the long view. When I’m butting heads with Keefe and manage to keep my cool, I know it’s a seed planted deep, just like the monologue stories Hugh tells himself unselfconsciously while drawing at his easel are clearly the ripened fruit of stories we told together years ago.
But looking beyond the myopic view of the boys that fills my stubborn parent’s head, part of what we’re harvesting is something very much larger than another anecdote about my sons. We’ve wanted so much to build around us the whole village it takes to raise a child. For a while when Keefe was Hugh’s age or younger, it seemed we had it, but much of the clan that was so richly part of our lives almost constantly then has become a sadly distant group of people. These things happen, as you know, with no malice but a certain inevitability. The vibrant young folk who partied with us are busy carving their own niches in an expanding view of the world and not for the most part terribly keen on the whirlwind of needy chaos our children provide us on a daily basis, and parents we were close to had children that have since grown able to attend to themselves, so they too are ready to move on to other perhaps quieter things. Finally, scheduling, work and distance (this was a group spread over several cities) add greatly to the cost of trying to remain a consistent presence in each other’s lives. But in the past couple of years, as quietly as the garden, another community of like-minded parents has sprouted together around us locally. A varied and interesting group who are pretty much walking the same road in life that we are, and who make such excellent company that it’s a darned sight more pleasant to walk it together.
So with further nostalgia, we’ve already done some canning and laying in preserves for the months ahead, and I look forward to more in the next few weeks. The nearby farmers’ market sports lovely locally grown produce far cheaper than the nearest supermarket chain, and the pressure canner isn’t gathering dust. Our house blend pasta sauce and jams don’t contain any ingredients a five year old can’t pronounce, and come somewhat cheaper per jar than their mass market equivalents, even though it’s straining our budget to pay for them up front like this. That’s another parenting truism as well: the effort you put in up front saves you more in the long run. That’s why we’re muddling through on a single income and investing so much direct time on the boys. There’ll be a winter’s day that we crack the seal on that jam and it’ll taste like canned summer, and there’ll be a day that Keefe really feels a sense of his own innate power and worth that’s distinct from the video game world of ‘power over others.’
One of the joys of canning lies in
its nature as a communal activity. I invited part of the community we’re
building to be with us when I filled my first jar of the year, and I’ll
invite others when I’m filling the last. My season of harvest needs those
social bookends, the stories shared over tea while the veggies are chopped
and the pot bubbles -- just for seasoning, like the couple of home-grown beans
that go in with the batch we bought. Are the beans we grew in this jar? In
that one? It doesn’t matter – they infuse the lot of them. With luck,
some of those anecdotes will also bubble to the top when we’re eating them
later, because what I’m trying to stuff into those unassuming jars is more
good memories, of a perfect end-of-summer day when my family opened like a
blossom – an everyday occurrence that is always miraculous, and never
happens the same way twice, and never lasts outside of memory. Like the
veggies in the back yard, the sacred garden of our tribe just needs simple
things: sunlight and water, and some regular attention, and it grows in
beauty and its ability to nourish us.
_______________
Michael Nabert is a Canadian writer who loves to talk and sing, and writes mainly about
parenting, the art of wooing and paleontology. Widely traveled, with an opinion about everything, his friends often describe him as having
"a
deplorable excess of character." He is currently stay-at-home dad to Hugh
and Keefe.
