Canning Colors

Does this look promising?

I don't think so.  It looks like kind of a mess to me:   a strainer full of mushy apples and seeds and tough cores.  But the book said---the book said---to boil the apples without peeling or cutting out their middles, because most of the pectin is in the skin and core.  Pectin is what makes fruit juice set up into jelly, and jelly was the best end I could devise for these apples.  So I boiled them all into an ugly muck.

I didn't have much to lose.  Someone gifted me the soft, mealy fruits.  It was an act of kindness, I'm sure, but my first bite vehemently declared that these apples were chicken food, not people food.

John remembers his grandmother making apple jelly---lining up her jars on the counter, filling them with the hot syrup and then floating a clear stream of melted paraffin on top for a seal.  I like to think that when the babies weren't crying and the hogs weren't out, his grandmother paused for a moment before she whisked the jars down to her closet under the basement stairs.

I like to think she took time to notice the sunlight flaming through the colors she had just sealed in glass.

I hope she smiled at the contrast when she set her autumn hues alongside chunks of summer green that she had canned with the pickles a few weeks earlier.  Colors tucked away for future reference, holed up in the closet beneath the steps, waiting for release into January's shroud of grey and tan and white.

When I tossed the pale mash to the chickens, they pounced, fighting and flapping and clucking loudly over the tastiest bits.  They didn't even miss the autumn brilliance that is sleeping in my basement.