The Domestics
Mom is visiting, so I know it is autumn. This is our time to be domestic as a mother and daughter. Sometimes it is crochet and knitting. Sometimes it is some sewing project or other. This year, it’s linens and jams.
Last weekend, we canned. There were tomatoes and pickled beets, and then there were jars and jars of strawberry jam and peach jam. She brought a pressure canner with her, and I set up an outdoor burner to use it, since my glass-top electric stove would never handle such a thing. And while the pickled beets and tomatoes hissed in the pressure cooker outside, my water bath canner handled all the jams. We ended up with a dozen or so pints of tomatoes, and about the same of pickled beets. I ended up canning 29 half-pints of strawberry jam, and two dozen half-pints of peach jam. That doesn’t count the jars I left unsealed in the fridge for immediate consumption. It was a good year for fruit jams. I haven’t made jelly or jam for many years. Maybe 30 years. Last year mom and I made champagne grape jelly, which was just amazing. And this year, I jumped in with both feet and peeled peaches until I was sticky from head to toe, and mashed strawberries with a hamburger flipper until my kitchen looked like I’d murdered someone. I regret nothing!
We get so domestic when we are together. I don’t remember us behaving this way when I was younger, but perhaps we did. Mom has always done crafts of one sort or another – sewing, crochet, for a while she did some cake decorating. Mom has an artistic spirit – she painted, fiddled with jewelry making, and many other things. I learned to sew from her and my grandmother, and I did quite a bit of sewing when I was a teen. I did other crafts that caught my fancy along the way. I even quilted at some point, although I don’t do much of it now. So when we get together each year, along with planning a short trip, and heading up into the mountains or trolling through the second-hand stores, we cook things, or make things. This year, it is the canning, and mom has been playing around starching my doilies that I am too lazy to starch. She used every bit of my cornstarch to make old-fashioned starch to starch antique pillowcases she’d brought to give me, and used every pill bottle and even my Grumpy Cat squeeze ball to form the ruffles in an especially pretty green and white doily.
And we work in the garden. There is harvesting to be done, and garden space to clean out for winter, and new gardens to either create or old gardens to maintain. This week, we went to my big plot at the community garden, and harvested almost everything. There were potatoes, and beans, and my one giant pumpkin (turns out it was 21 pounds of pumpkin!). My future son-in-law, Robert, took a Sunday afternoon to build me a new raised bed, to expand my current vegetable gardening space. I managed to find some rotten straw to get it started. Mom and I will go get some rabbit poop in a week or two, to give it another layer to work in over the winter. She knows gardening, and I depend on her expertise. And I depend on my own physical strength to get the bed in place, get the hay and manure spread out, to get the grunt work done. We are a good team.
We are also tired. So we’re going to take another little trip, as we do every year. Last year we headed to southern Colorado and visited the Great Sand Dunes, Bishop Castle, Lake Isabel, and the Florissant Fossil Beds. This year, we’re going north – to South Dakota. We’re going to revisit some memories there. As a child/young teen, we visited the area around the Black Hills. I remember Mt. Rushmore, a horseback ride on a trail up in the hills, and a visit to a strange place, Wall Drug. We’re going to take a drive through Spearfish Canyon and see the water falls, and spend some time on the Needles Highway. There won’t be a horseback ride, but we’ll visit Wall Drug, and Mt. Rushmore. A few days away is just what I need, and these times with my mom are precious because I don’t know how long they will last. I look forward to these little trips, and I’m very blessed that I can afford to do them.
