Mason Jars: You've Got to Love Them

I just read a wonderful collection of stories by Gary Carden in his book called MASON JARS IN THE FLOOD. Carden is a great storyteller in the tradition of mountain people in Western North Carolina. Some people call them "Rememberers" and I love that name. Much better than raconteurs. (Someone introduced me once when I was giving a talk as a wonderful raconteur. I had to rush home afterwards and look it up in the dictionary. It sounded like someone who ran the roulette wheels in Las Vegas. The dictionary just said it meant: storyteller. As a Texas friend of mine used to say, "Those French. They have a word for everything." And they do. Most of their words make you pucker when you say them --- like "we, we madame". And I honestly think that's how the French got the reputation as being lovers. They are always puckered up like they are ready to kiss somebody.) But back to Gary's book. I bought it because of the name. I love Mason Jars. I love the name. I love the way they look. I love the memory of what my Mother and my Grandmother used to put in them. They called it canning, but there were no cans involved. They should have called it "jarring". When fruits and vegetables started coming on in the summer, I would start washing jars. Actually I boiled them. They had to be clean and germ free. Then the women started filling them with peaches, green beans and tomatoes mostly. But also jellies and jams. My Mother's prized possession was a big pressure cooker which made canning quicker and easier. But it spit steam and sputtered like it might blow its lid and kill us all. She wouldn't let me in the kitchen when the pressure cooker was cooking. She claimed she knew a woman whose cooker exploded and took the roof off the kitchen. I doubted it even as a kid because she and my Grandmother were given to exaggeration. We didn't call it lying because they would say this stuff to make a point that would stick in your head. Once when I was grown and had teenage daughters, my Grandmother came to visit and was alarmed that they had electric blankets. I heard her telling them later about a friend of her's who got "fried" by an electric blanket. "She was like a crisp piece of bacon. With a head on it." It was an outrageous story, but none of my daughters would sleep under an electric blanket after that. Canning gave my Mother so much satisfaction. She would stack the jars on the pantry shelf and stand there admiring her handy work. And it was work: all that snapping and stringing of green beans; and the peeling of peaches and tomatoes. We were never allowed to eat the food in the jars when it was first canned. There were still fresh vegetables in the fields. "Wait for cold weather," my Mother would admonish. And when cold weather set in, she would start opening the Mason Jars. She would open a jar of tomatoes and say, "Smell this. It smells like summer." And it did. And it tasted like summer and made all the hard work of filling the Mason Jars worthwhile. I have a lot of Mason Jars sitting around my house in the mountains of North Carolina. A lot of them are filled with marbles. Some with buttons. Some with flower seeds. I've actually got some that are filled with food. All of them were winners in the Western North Carolina State Fair. The whole peaches look like art; even the green beans look like art...much too pretty to eat. My wife --- a city girl --- has always been afraid to eat home canned foods. I told her they found a jar of canned pickles in King Tut's tomb...more than 2,000 years old and still crispy. She said, "You lie like your Mother and Grandmother." I do. I'm a raconteur. I never learned to can, I regret to say. It's something that I could have passed on to my own children. It's doubtful they would want to do all that work. I guess I can leave them all my Mason Jars filled with marbles and stuff. You don't need a pressure cooker for filling jars with marbles.