Thankful Harvest

Every harvest time I think of my mom.  We lived on a ranch in the mountains of Wyoming, but each year she planted a large garden.  There were rows of beans, peas, carrots, and beets.  (Also a few rows of bachelor buttons, zinnias, and marigolds.)  We visited my grandma in Utah and brought back bushels of fruit from her orchard for canning.  When fall came, mom and all us kids would pick the bounty, and she would let us help prepare them for canning.  First of all, they were rinsed in a large, round laundry tub, Peas were shucked, corn cut off the cob. Beans were snapped, except for a few of the very best, which she would carefully place in jars--all straight and proper like a row of soldiers, to be used when company came for supper. 

Then after the jars were full, into the pressure cooker they went, for 20 minutes or so of processing, all on a coal/wood burning cook stove.  By the end of the season she had "put up" 100 quarts of beans, many pints of peas, and countless quarts of other vegetables, along with many quarts of peaches, pears, apricots and applesauce.  We would have enough fruits and vegetables to last til the next harvest.  Looking back it must have been a huge task, but she was always sang through the whole job, thankful that God again had given a good harvest.