Like many who grew up here in the mountains, my childhood summers were filled with chores and activities around the house.
I was helping my mother with the garden, then helping preserve the bounty of the summer as she canned.
It was expected for mountain families to wash and keep their canning jars for use again, and ours was no exception. We kept our jars in the basement, ready to be washed and re-used.
Of course, you had to prepare the beans, cucumbers or other vegetables before you could start putting the jars to use.
I recall days in the late summer—those days when the temperature was spiking, the sky was clear, and humidity made you feel like a damp rag—when it was my job to sit on the front porch stringing and snapping green beans, or peeling cucumbers for mom’s special bread-and-butter pickle recipe.
The growing season had begun in the spring with Mom’s cousin coming by with his tractor to plow the garden, then returning a week later, if it hadn’t rained, to disc the large rows of raised soil and furrows down so it was ready for planting.
I recall the smell of the soil, an intoxicating aroma that seemed to me to represent the coming of the growing season. I would be expected to be out in the garden after school, hunting for rocks that had been tilled up. It was my job to throw them to the side so they would not interfere with growing. I did that, but often I also just stretched out on the dark red soil to breathe in the rich odor of the earth while I stared at the clouds drifting above in the Carolina blue sky. Occasionally spotting a jetliner sparking above, I would wonder where the occupants were from, and where they were headed.
I would wonder what it was like to fly.
Next came the laying off of rows with the hoe. New rocks were uncovered in that process.
I once read that the rock walls criss-crossing New England came about because farmers would come across the rocks while plowing, and would carry them to the edge of the garden. Those rocks were much larger than what I dealt with—up north they were called “two-handers.” They were light enough to lift, but it took both hands.
The rocks seemed to repopulate our garden every year, a circumstance caused by frost heave, when winter thaw and freeze drove stones upward out of the earth. The rocks weren’t huge, but they kept me busy.
Our garden usually consisted of bush beans and corn, squash, cucumbers and tomatoes. Nana had grapevines that fruited a dark purple skinned grape, and we made apple sauce from an ancient apple tree in our backyard that was a remnant from my grandfather’s old orchard.
From such a harvest we canned as much as we could.
The kitchen would be hot on a Saturday afternoon in August as mom sterilized the Mason jars and the lids she’d bought at Ingles Grocery, and I was on the porch, dragooned into peeling or cutting.
All of Mom’s canning materials were spread out, along with the salt, vinegar, onions and mustard seed for the pickles.
Looking back I wonder why we didn’t do all the hot work outside where a good breeze would have cooled off the exertion. We didn’t have air conditioning, and those August days were stifling. As an adult I still like to can things, but I now prefer to set up a propane burner in the shade of a tall tree so the temperature in the house isn’t overwhelming.
I’m sure there were times when Nana or my sister or one of my brothers were out on the porch, peeling or stringing and snapping beans alongside me.
As evening arrived we’d be finished and sitting down to rest, listening for the pop of the sound of the canning lids announcing that a particular jar was sealed.
This year I plan no canning, but be assured I will one day do it again.
—Jonathan Austin