One of my earliest memories of food preservation involves helping get peaches ready for canning. (That was before we had our home freezer, and I still prefer canned peaches to frozen ones in spite of the heat the canning kettle adds to the kitchen in the hottest time of summer.) I clearly remember standing on a stool beside Mother at the kitchen sink, fishing warm peaches out of the cold water where she’d dumped them after scalding to loosen the skins. As soon as they were cool enough to comfortably handle, I could slip the skins off, hand then to Mother to slice in half vertically and remove the pits. Then she carefully cut them into even-size wedges, arranged them in quart jars and filled the jars with a light syrup she had made of sugar and water.

Peaches were, and still are, my favorite fruit but only if fully tree-ripened and heavy with juice. Such tasty peaches are difficult to obtain these days unless you have your own peach trees. Ripe peaches are fragile, difficult and expensive to ship. I remember they once arrived in our kitchen wrapped individually in purple tissue in shallow wooden crates called ‘flats’ and fragrant with their tantalizing sweetness. I don’t remember helping with the canning of other fruits and vegetables at that young age, but I do remember doing so later, during the time before we had our own freezer.

Dad’s dream of raising most of our food on ten acres of land resulted in cows, pigs and chickens as well as a huge garden, berry bushes, grapes and a variety of fruit trees. I’d always enjoyed tagging along with Dad, helping with (and learning from) whatever chore he was engaged in, and gardening was nearly a daily activity during summer. Most days, that was done in the evening, after supper when temperatures had cooled.

One summer when he had planted a large patch of sweetcorn, we’d had enough rain that weeds posed a real problem. One weed that Dad called bindweed was climbing the cornstalks, hogging the nutrients from the soil and threatening what he had hoped would be a bumper crop for the freezer. Because it was a weekday and he had a business to run downtown, he had asked Mother to send my older sister Dorothy and me to cut or pull the most vigorous of the weeds from the corn. When he’d left for work early that day, he hadn’t known that the pleasant, cool morning would turn into the hottest, most humid day of that entire summer.

As usual when school was out, Mother had let us sleep late and we didn’t get to the chore until after ten o’clock. Little more than an hour later, we were back at the house, faces red and throbbing with the heat, drenched in sweat and itchy from irritating plants and biting insects. Mother, comforted us with glasses of ice water and cold, wet washrags for our flaming cheeks and itching arms, but said it was really important to save the sweetcorn and that we should take lots of breaks to rest and cool down. We reluctantly returned to the task but had stuck with it for less than a half hour when Dorothy declared that she’d “had it” and charged past me, running toward the house. I followed soon after, feeling guilty but too miserable to stay a second longer. I headed straight upstairs to the bathroom, visualizing a lengthy soak in the big, deep bathtub, but Dorothy had gotten there before me. Mother compensated by turning the powerful portable fan toward me, plunging my feet into a dishpan full of cold water, and presenting me with a huge chocolate ice cream soda. My pleasure at the relief was marred by the knowledge that I had let Dad down and I resolved to promise him I would get up early tomorrow and try to get rid of the worst of the weeds.

Dad, when he got home at suppertime, said that he’d had no idea it would have gotten so hot that day, that the corn was nearly ready for harvest, and that hot humid weather was just what it needed to stay ahead of the weeds. “If it stays this hot tonight, you can hear it growing,” he told us. It was true. After dark, I sat on the back porch steps beside him and listened to the squeak of growing cornstalks.