A sweat bead drips off her nose as she prays for wholeness and health for the peach eaters and providers while canning peaches which are so perfectly formed – 36 each without a single bug – she knows they are perverted with pesticides. Still they are juicy and sweet and sensuous to the taste buds. There is an ummm in every bite.
As she dips and peels she considers the mega production of food to bring 100 cans of peaches to every Kroger store every week. Just how many peaches is that? She averages 2 per pint jar. The perfect amount to heat with a little nutmeg and heavy whipping cream in the dead of winter when a peach she had prayed over tastes like hope.
She wonders at the fears circulating among her most respected friends and colleagues that the grid will go down, the system must break in order to be fixed. So she will eat peaches while the world struggles in chaos. She won’t say I told you so because she doesn’t want the scenario to play out, but she does preserve food, has water purification tablets, candles and kerosene, matches and gas for the grill and wood for the stove.
She reflects on the law of attraction and knows that attracting Mason jars and seeds is easier for her than attracting cash.
She remembers her mother and the ladies at Florence Christian Church gathering in the kitchen basement of the Disciples Church each bringing their harvest to preserve food together. Lightening their load in a kitchen big enough accommodate the process with a play ground big enough to entertain the kids. Coffee in the big pot, sandwiches, peanut butter crackers to feed in the present moment. Corn, beans, tomatoes and networking in loving fellowship to feed in the winter.
She ponders the pioneer woman isolated on the prairie. Hungry children and no amenities. Not even a fan, much less air conditioning and running water. Carrying water to boil from seed to jar to the table. What if Pioneer woman hated cooking? Or had a headache?
She angers at the thought of big corporations refusing to label honestly and big agriculture putting poison in foods. And she wonders if, as a progressive society, we have gotten too lazy to even feed ourselves?
Are we lazy? Spoiled? A new lifestyle in this progressing world where someone else does it cheaper and more effectively and we aren’t chained to the daily feeding of ourselves. Yet do the producers have the consumer’s interest as a priority? Or their bottom line?
Canning is no longer a necessity but a choice and, somehow, it’s one of my favorite “chores.” No matter how much I sweat. And, I could turn on the air conditioner, but the smell of the rain and hearing the pattering on my roof makes me happy. Plus, the food growing in my back yard is being fed.
A most subversive act, organic veggies from my own yard.