Canning to save our lives

When strawberries burst into the farmers market, I get the call: It's time to start canning.

For the past five years or so, two friends and I have met in my kitchen starting this time of year. We gather all summer, from May strawberries through September peppers. We pass through June blueberries and cucumbers, then July peaches. We make a delighted stop at August figs, if we can get them, and end with relish in September.

When we started this custom, it was all Motown on the stereo, jokes at the mess we made, a beer or two between batches of jam or pickles. At the end of the day, we counted the number of Christmas gifts we had just taken care of and thought about who would most deserve them.

Now, when it feels intensely necessary for us to continue doing this, it's becoming harder for us to arrange our canning dates.

Time accelerates. A year costs more than 365 days when you get to a certain point in your life, and that point is not always connected to age.

The years blow by harder now. They're like tractor-trailers on a six-lane highway, tangling my hair as I gape from the shoulder, shaking my body with their frightening force.

My friends and I know we need the time together over steaming pots, staining our fingers with fruit or crying as we slice onions. But the rush of those semis knocks us back. We lose our balance.

One of my canning buddies had to change jobs after suffering a serious injury and is building a new business, although she is still full of big plans and optimism.

The other is caring for a loved one in decline and a teen in serious trouble who requires constant monitoring. I really don't know how she does it and have told her so many times.

She declared that we needed to make more strawberry jam this year, because she ran out of last year's. "I need it," she said. "And I'm not giving it all away this year, either."

Sometimes, you have to give yourself jam first.

We finally set a date, and I headed for the farmers market. I had to buy the berries from a different farmer. The man who for years had sold me our jam-making strawberries, and who had offered colorful stories to go with them, was missing. I couldn't bring myself to try to find out why.

On jam day, the stereo stayed off and the beer stayed in the fridge. What my friends and I needed this time wasn't a party.

We talked. We listened. And we talked some more.

For these few hours, we knew what we were doing and what the outcome of our efforts would be. We knew how to make jam come out right and knew that goodness would follow.

I listened. The sweet scent of warm strawberries and sugar filled the kitchen. The steam of the hot jars and the methodical fill-wipe-seal of preparing them felt like an inadequate defense against the whoosh of the deadly trucks and their heavy cargo.

But by the end of the day, we had built a fragile wall with the rosy, jewellike jars of jam. We had solved no problems permanently. We had cured no one's body or spirit. Those sparkling jars, though, soothed us.

I have another friend whose dream is to move back to her mountain home, to work the farm with her daddy and can tomatoes with her mama. She has talked about this for most of the decade that I've known her. The move is always in the works, set to happen when the money comes in and it doesn't have to be spent on a broken car or air conditioner.

She may not hear them, but the years are roaring in my ears. If she waits too long, there will be no jars of red-orange tomatoes lined up on the counters and no talk in the kitchen, where it seems easier for people like us to let go of what's on our minds.

Go now, I tell her. I will miss you terribly, but go. Don't wait another day searching for the right time that will never come. Put the pedal to the metal.