Growing up, one of the great rituals of summer was CANNING. Having been raised in a Swedish Mormon farming family, CANNING was required. LOTS of canning. All kinds of fruit, vegetables, and sometimes fish. It was all laid up neatly in the root cellar - jars and jars of summer's bounty from their orchards, and from the berry fields. During the big strawberry season, women in the church picked dozens of flats of strawberries and descended on my grandmother's house to can the berries.
The Mennonite neighbors came to help, much as the Mennonite men came to help bring in the hay (and my grandparents went to their farms to help in turn). Flats were stacked in rows. Various women hulled and washed the berries, and others cleaned and boiled the jars, put in the berries, sealed them shut with wax.
We worked outdoors. Our job, when we were young, was to mind the little kids so they didn't get burned or hurt. I recall one summer when my brother LEIF HANSEN was very small, he was put in a playpen next to a stack of strawberry flats. We all lost track of him for a half-hour or so, convinced that he was safe, since he was on the other side of the stack and out of sight. Then someone looked, and he had pulled down a flat of berries into the playpen and had eaten all of them. He was a red, mushy mess. In this little watercolor of that day, as I remember it, you can see LEIF in the lower left, covered with smushed berries.
Off to find some strawberries,
Diana
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