Canned Madness

If a person were to page back in this blog all the way to July, he or she would find a picture that looks almost exactly like the one above. In that post I was bragging about how much canning I'd gotten done already, so early in the season. I planned to ship off delicious christmas presents to all my relatives and friends, joining that respected club of women who make their own preserves and generously hand them out. Thrifty, crafty women. The two most exciting packages that arrived at our house in the Christmas season when I was young were the ones from my grandmother, full of delicious pickles and relishes, and from my mother's friend April, full of jewel-toned homemade cordial, of which I was allowed only tiny sips. This year, I was going to be the sender of such tempting treats and the receiver of all the imagined admiration.

But I have this thing with the mail. My siblings will be nodding along at this point. It's a hereditary thing in our family to be utterly incapable of dealing with the postal system. Mom used to let the mail sit out until the mailman stopped delivering it. I should have known myself well enough to know that making the preserves was the easy part: wrapping and boxing and gathering addresses and shipping was the impossibly unlikely part.

So now I am putting up this picture of the current contents of my preserves shelf for two reasons: to prove to everybody what an industrious soul I truly was this past growing season, and to solicit help in figuring out how to get rid of all this crap before the next growing season.