For all of those who are–or will be–canning a bountiful harvest of garden fruits and vegetables, there are others out here who are canning-deficient. The Green Giant and the vendors at the local farmer’s market save us from ourselves, season after season.
Life in Kitchen
The Tombstone Pizza was the last straw,
their breaking point.
Her family sentenced her to life in kitchen.
And it was no country club kitchen,
no.
They marshmallow-creamed her to their Amana door,
the neighborhood’s first human
refrigerator magnet.
Sometime during the seventh night,
the kids heard her scream for Nutty Bars,
and a few nights later for Ho-Hos.
But during the twenty-first night of captivity,
her husband swore she muttered
zucchini bread
and they let her down.
Consider her newly acquired skills:
She’s learned to make Ragu from scratch,
and after weeks of intensive kitchen work,
she, alone, unlocked the secret
to Velveeta.
Neighbors say her husband gives guided tours
of their kitchen daily,
that she is, indeed, a culinary wonder.
(Some admit, however, that her hands have grown
to look much like egg whisks,
and that when she speaks,
you can almost make out that pale pink spatula
that is her tongue.)
Last week, she made our local paper,
Community Events section, page two,
when she organized a picket
of the high school lunch room
the day they were serving tator tots
and meatball surprise.
And her children report that she has recently made
the Guinness Book of World Records
for the single largest order of Mason jars
from a True Value Hardware Store.
You see, she’s into canning these days.
And word has it, that on the last guided tour of her kitchen,
she unveiled her latest acquisition:
a twenty-by-twenty-foot pantry.
Lining the shelves there
were rows of canned goods neatly arranged:
corn, beans, tomatoes, rutabagas
And on the floor of the pantry,
in the largest Mason jar they’d ever seen,
she canned her husband.
He floated there in cucumber brine,
his skin and hair a pale and glossy green.
And as he bobbed about
to the extraordinary hum of the Cuisinart,
they say he was smiling.
And so was she.
