Five mason jars at the back of the pantry
when we moved our mother from a two-bedroom
to a single. Years of preserving anything grown
or bought in bulk, protection against hunger,
and an art. Even after poverty’s ended there’s faithfulness
to the old ways, a joy to pick fresh fruit, the calm and surety
of a kitchen filled with steam, jars upside down in boiling water,
a sterilization against losing generations of wisdom.
Tomatoes blanched, skins loosened in ice water,
then cooked all day in vats. Something for the future.
Something to reawaken summer when windows frost.
We’ve watched her all these years plant and harvest,
purchase crates of peaches and pears, turn wild
raspberries into jam.
Five quarts of apples in the new apartment’s pantry
preserved for the pies my father
never lived to eat.
Debbie K. Trantow received her MFA from the University of Minnesota and was awarded the 2001 Gesell Summer Writing Fellowship. Her chapbook Hearing Turtle’s Words was published by Spoon River Poetry Press. She’s been published in Gertrude, The North Coast Review, Gyroscope, Comstock Review, Creosote, Westchester Review, Poem, and other literary magazines and journals and has poems upcoming in Pinyon and North Dakota Quarterly.