"Gonna move out to the country, gonna eat me allot of peaches...peaches come from a can they were put there by a man...da-da-da-da-peaches!" I think that's how the song goes. Anyway, everyone knows peaches don't actually come from a can. Although we do call it canning, they come from a jar. Lots and lots of jars.
Do you know how they get in those jars? Child labor. Slave labor. Child-slave labor actually. When I was roughly eight years old my family, which FYI consisted more of kids than adults by a 2:1 ratio, went peach picking. We picked eight bushels of peaches. Do you know how much a bushel is? Me neither exactly, but it's like allot! I know this because I got to experience each bushel individually every step of the canning way it seemed. Picking them seemed to take hours and hours. But when you're eight your units of time and other measures are a bit different than grown ups. For example I know for a fact that it took us long enough to make necessary my mom's explanation of how to ration personal resources that you didn't even know you had. How to not only ration your water so that you wouldn't run out of water, but how to drink it in a way that will allow you to hold out on using the bathroom as long as humanly possible yet without becoming dehydrated. Also, how you should keep your sweatshirt on for as long as possible-even though you're hot and sweaty and dying to take it off-so that when you do take it off...you know even now as I'm recalling this one it's making less sense to me than it did the day she explained it. I think it was something like, so when you did take it off it would feel really, really good and the sun from the rest of the day wouldn't feel so hot. This was stuff she picked up from picking crops out in the farm lands of nowhere Washington when she was in high school. See, again I hadn't had the chance to learn any of this because I was, again, only eight!
As bad as the picking had seemed, it was nothing compared to the endless days of canning ahead. We first layed out all the peaches one by one in rows on top of blankets and sleeping bags in the parlour. This way after my brother and I were done with our schoolwork (yes this family homeshooled-big surprise) everyday we'd go around and gently, gently squeeze each peach to see which ones were ripe enough to be canned that day. After collecting the appropriate peaches we had to do our quota of peach peeling for the day. My mom would boil them and then put them in cold water in the sink and then we'd peel them-I'm sorry, is this just as agonizing to read about as it was to do?
Let me fast forward. We eventually had enough giant jars of peaches to fill the basement. My dad even had to build or somehow acquire cabinets the size of armoirs to store these jars in. Unfortunately, I believe we even had a hefty number of jars remaining when it was time for us to move and we then had to carefully, pack and move the fruits of our labors making them labors once more.
Needless to say I've had an aversion to canning anything really, but especially peaches ever since. Fast forward seventeen years later and I finally let a friend convince me to can peaches together. I really had to gear up mentally for this. I researched it online and it didn't seem too complicated or involved once you had the proper equipment. And contrary to urban myth, it could be done in just one day! So I limited the peaches and jars that I would commit to. I resolved to do it in my own kitchen thinking that if things went south I could just stop. I could quit. I could cease to can if I wanted to because I'm a grown up now and I could make decisions like that without having to explain myself to anyone. I continued to say things like this to myself in hopes that I would succeed in convincing myself of such.
The day of the canning started out well. Daria and I were ready to tackle this feat and chalk one up for the next generation of stay at home moms and homemakers who were dedicated to carrying on traditions as quaint as canning.
We ran into a glitch when we realized that Daria and I had acquired different varieties of peaches as well as different brands and size jars. We decided to do all of her peaches and jars first and then do all of mine. We read and re-read the directions out loud together trying to interpret them as we went along. I must admit there was more than one step we eliminated as we found no more value in them than we did in doing the hokey-pokey.
Half way thru all the peeling, slicing, boiling, and sweating I started having flashbacks and the "see it's not so bad" pep talks were wearing off.
So for the record, it kind of is so bad. It doesn't help that canning peaches at their prime means laboring in a hot kitchen during the hottest part of the year. But I got to send my dad several jars of freshly home canned peaches by yours truly and they were such a big hit and so much work that I'm thinking of sending him more for Christmas just to make it all worth it!
