Canning Day

There is an event every year that signals the end of summer for those who've lived in small towns or on farms. It always begins around eight in the morning, when you are woken up by the sound ominous rattling and bubbling noises. Running downstairs to investigate, you get assaulted by oppressive, Vietnam humidity and the overwhelming smell of tomatoes. This day is special day for all of us known as canning day.

The previous weeks are a constant build up to this day. Mom and Dad begin thrusting tomatoes onto everyone they can find. At the same time, all of our gardening friends are throwing tomatoes at us as well, so this method rarely depletes the quantity of tomatoes in the house. I'm sure that after a few days, a single tomato may change hands about seven times, most of the time however, that very same tomato will end up back in its household of origin. "Aaron, eat some tomato slices!" I don't like raw tomatoes, but such an excuse rarely works.

"Do you know how much work goes into growing tomatoes?"

For a vegetable that is so "difficult" to grow, you'd think there would be a deficit of them. Somehow though, every cousin, aunt, friend, sibling, neighbor, coworker or random vagrant on the street seems to have bushels to give away.

So we eat tomatoes. Tomato salads, spaghetti, fresh salsa, tomato quiche, tomato cake, tomato bread...everything has tomatoes in it. Just when the giant basket of tomatoes or in our case, sink full of tomatoes is just about gone, the next wave ripens. At some point, when your BSAL (Blood Salicylic Acid Level) reaches the near deadly level of .2, when the body rejects the intake of a single squishy bite, canning day is upon us.

Canning day is a bad misnomer, there are always too many tomatoes to can in a single day. So we spend two or five days, typically over labor day weekend, boiling, peeling, chopping, seasoning, canning, sealing. The counter fills with salsas, stewed tomatoes, chopped tomatoes, marinara, pickled tomatoes, tomato chutney. We trip over lids, broken glass and slide upon pools of boiling water. When work begins the next day, all gardeners have blistered, burned fingertips.

Then the next round of tomato trading begins. Jars swap hands fifty times. Everyone has their special canned good everyone loves; everyone has their canned goods that are terrible. And everyone knows somebody who can't can anything well. This person is always the most prolific, giving canner in town.

After all the jar trading, the canned goods get packed up, brought to basement and set next to the last twenty years of canned tomatoes, where they will never be seen again until the next load is stored in a year. Nobody wants to eat tomatoes until the next year.