Standing next to

"Can a woman forget her nursing child, or show no compassion for the child of her womb? Even these may forget, yet I will not forget you." — Isaiah 49:15

The smell of tomatoes cooking down is a smell that takes me back to a specific kitchen and a specific afternoon and a specific woman standing at the stove.

I was twelve, maybe thirteen. It was August and my mother was canning. The kitchen was the hottest room in the house, which was saying something, because the whole house was hot. We did not have central air. We had a window unit in the living room that worked most of the time and did nothing for the kitchen, and my mother canned anyway, because the tomatoes were ready and the tomatoes did not care about the heat.

She stood at the stove with her back to me and she did not explain what she was doing. She did not say now watch this or pay attention or this is how you do it. She simply did it. She lifted the tomatoes out of the boiling water with a slotted spoon and set them on the towel by the sink and when they were cool enough she slipped the skins off with her hands. Her hands were red from the heat and the juice and she did not seem to mind.

I stood beside her because standing beside her was what I did. I was not tall enough to reach the top of the pot without standing on a step, so she gave me the jars. I held them while she ladled. The ladle was heavy and the tomatoes were heavier and the jars were hot from being sterilized and I held them with a towel folded around the rim the way she showed me, not by telling me but by doing it once and then handing me the towel.

The lids went on. The rings went on. The jars went into the canner. And then we waited. My mother wiped down the counter and I sat at the kitchen table and we did not talk because there was nothing to talk about. The work was the conversation. The standing next to was the conversation. The canner rattled on the stove the way it always rattled and the kitchen smelled the way August kitchens smell when women are doing what their mothers taught them to do.

The first lid popped about twenty minutes later. Then the others, one by one, over the next half hour. Each pop meant the seal had taken. Each pop meant the jars would keep. My mother heard each one and nodded, not at me, not at anything, just a small nod that said the thing she had done had worked.

Her mother taught her. She taught me. I have canned tomatoes every August since I was old enough to hold the ladle, and every August the kitchen smells the same and the lids pop the same and I nod the same small nod.

She did not explain it. She did not need to. Some things are passed down by standing next to.

Lord, thank you for the women who teach without saying a word.