Ancestors and Applesauce
Open Source from Wikipedia
A few months ago, Mel spent the evening making some home-made applesauce with the apples from our tree in the backyard. He used his grandmother’s recipe. The apples are tart and small and delicious if you have a lot of time to work with them. He peeled and chopped about 40 apples and we ate all the applesauce for dinner. I remember my grandmother having containers and containers of home-made applesauce. I wonder how my ancestors managed to preserve so much food.
For the last couple of years, I have been working to try to put some food away. I am shocked by the volume of food that is required if I want to eat it during the winter. I buy what I consider large quantities of things–a bushel of tomatoes, a flat of strawberries, and they disappear as I make jam or sauce. That is kind of what happened with the apples.
I have been judging myself by a tough standard, I realized. I am the first woman in my family to continue in a career after I married. The women I admire who were fantastic at putting food away were housewives. If it were my job to put food away, I imagine I would be a fair bit better at it. I picture them never really sitting down, but then I think of the handwork my grandmother did–always making something–and I realize she had to sit down for that. And she watched her soap operas. I am not sure her life was quite as full as I thought it was. She had some down time I think.
I spend my time in front of a computer. It is ironic that I work and feel lazy because I can’t do all the tasks women from previous generations did.
