The older you get, the more it seems you enjoy stories from your parents and grandparents. What was it really like when they were a kid? What did they do for fun?
Childhood, when you are in it, seems like it will never end. But you turn around, look in the mirror, and your youth has suddenly vanished. You realize your parents aren’t so much older than you — as you used to think they were.
My kids laughed and told me just the other day, “No, you were never a kid, mommy.” Obviously, to them, I’ve always just been a mommy. There was nothing before, and nothing after.
Hopefully, with age, comes wisdom and truth. As I’ve grown up, family traditions and old ways of doing things have become more interesting to me. As I child, I would usually spend a week of the summer with my grandparents in Indiana. They had a large garden, and I used to love to go and pick berries and beans or corn with my grandfather in the early mornings.
Now, I don’t have a large garden, but I have become more interested in what my family is putting in their mouths lately.
They tell us now that processed foods are bad. But really, that all depends on where — and how — they are processed. Processed foods from home, for example, are different than processed foods you find at the store.
So this year, I thought I would preserve an old family tradition, and learn how to can.
In the 1790s Frenchman Nicholas Appert pioneered the process of food canning, according to the CAN and Aerosol News, after the French military offered a cash prize for a new method to preserve food. Canning was a much-needed necessity at the time.
And it’s still a necessity in our world today. Any grocery store you go to is stocked chock-full of canned goods. It seems we are all so busy, we have a hard time making something for dinner, much less finding time to make something worth saving. So why can something yourself — when it seems like such an unnecessary chore? Quality. Period. My homemade apple butter puts the kind at the grocery stores to shame.
And as I mixed together ingredients, while my husband (so dutifully) peeled and chopped apples for me, I realized this is what it’s all about.
Canning reminds me of better, simpler times when time spent together was the most important thing. When what (not how much) you were eating really mattered.
It’s funny how quality time in the kitchen can mean so much when you are grown up. It even made magic happen, because suddenly the season changed at my house. It’s a cool, crisp morning, and the smell of apples and cinnamon fill my house. Yes, it’s fall, all at once.
I don’t want my kids to grow up and only eat things that come from a package. The best things in life require time and energy, but are so worth it in the end. Hard work, for those with patience, can pay off.
Sometimes I feel that generations before me may have had a better quality of life because they made more of an effort to put the essential elements into it: love, laughter and time.
I want to help my boys gather the quality ingredients, toss them in the pot, let it simmer, and have the best life possible — pure and simple.
