It's just a little salsa

Last week I made salsa. First time in many years, those days when I would pick or buy bushels of tomatoes in season and can them or make salsa. Always good in homemade chili. Always good with tortilla chips or scrambled eggs.

I'm not sure what got into me--Linda's salsa, I guess. I used her recipe, with a change or two, and came away with three small jars. It was tasty, and the jars--none of them new--all sealed. Neat, I thought. And so I made some more.

Of course, I didn't have fresh tomatoes as I used to years ago, so I used canned, diced tomatoes. Still it's good salsa. Now I have seven jars of it. All sealed.

Seven small jars is not so many. In theory they could be gone soon. But in actuality they may last quite a while, because I don't just sit down with a bowl of chips and a bowl of salsa, and I don't make chili every week, you know. Or even every month. So I may have a year's supply of salsa here.

It's a difficult thing, even after more than ten years, to understand at the tissue level that I don't need anything in quantity anymore. No more getting bushels of apples and pressing them for juice. My kids could drink a gallon or more with dinner. And they did. So I would get a lot of apples.

No more picking peaches or apricots or cherries for canning or grapes for steaming. No more drying pears or making pear butter. No need to put up jam at all anymore, and no need to try to make it all last through a winter. I know we brought cherries and peaches with us when we moved here from Caldwell. My kids were grown and leaving home, you know, so those home-canned goods lasted through more than a few winters.

And I have jars of jam in my basement that are nearly as old as this house. Silly to keep them. I'll get rid of them one of these days. But it's a hard thing to do--give up all those provident ways of living. It's like becoming a different person. Those practices of living get into the mind and the muscles. Hard to root them out. Hard to believe in the changes.