Canning pears as a senior citizen

(A counter full of canned pears.  My kitchen will look like this soon, right?)

Today I intend to can as many of the pears from our pear tree as is humanly possible.  I have been waiting for this day for weeks, as I watch the greenish fruits become more succulent and yellow with every passing August day.  I pruned the tree in January when you are supposed to, enduring bitter cold.  I tried to keep raccoons from climbing the tree and eating the fruit.  I picked up ripe fruits that dropped on the ground before Zeus could eat them.  I have done everything right, and now the moment of truth is here---today---right now.  I can't help it that my wife's sister is visiting; she will just have to peel pears until this important work is done.

I have been checking on our supplies for this job for about a month.  Wide mouth jars-check.  Wide mouth lids-check.  Wide mouth rings-check.  Sugar-----shit.  Holy crap, we need sugar, and lots of it.  And ascorbic acid to prevent spoilage and browning of the fruit.  On my way home from the airport the other day, I stopped at the Candor market and beat out a more elderly lady to load the two remaining bags of sugar from the lowest shelf to my shopping cart.  One disadvantage of aging is that you can not bend over as far or as fast as a younger, 62-year old retiree.  I don't think a woman of her age should be eating sugary foods anyway, so I probably did her a favor.  She might even be a diabetic. 

So with Management's guidance, I carefully went through the steps for proper and safe canning.  Washed the jars and rings in the dishwasher, sterilized the lids in boiling water, mixed up a light sugar water solution, peeled pears, cut them in half, hollowed out the core, placed the pear halves in a clean jar, poured the solution into the jar to within a half inch of the top, put the lid on, tightened down the ring, placed the full jars in the pressure canner on the stove, and waited for it to boil for 10 minutes.  When the boiling was over and the pressure was relieved (these pressure cookers scare the hell out of me), I removed the jar of pears to cool, and waited for the lid to snap down due to the vacuum formed inside the cooling jar.  And voila!  Four beautiful jars of pears.  Four?  What the heck??!!

It turns out that only the pears on top of the basket were ripe, so I could only can a few jars today.  Now I need to wait until the rest of the fruit turns.  I've picked up and squeezed each piece of fruit to check for softness so many times that my hand is cramping.  How long can I sit in this chair watching that basket of fruit?  Does it take longer for paint to dry or for fruit to ripen?  How many more hours will this take?  Will it happen at midnight or early in the morning?  Maybe tomorrow, but I'll be ready.

A brief anatomy of a 41-year marriage

(I don't think I have ever kissed my wife on the beach under a setting sun.  Real life is better than that.)

Today, my wife and I celebrate our 41st wedding anniversary.  Holy crap.  Has it been that long?  We got married young and, as the saying goes, we were so green that if you put us in the ground we would have grown.  Now, we are old enough that we can't remember half of what we have learned.  But this can work to your advantage men.  I have two anniversary cards, on which I have written a very small "e" or "o".  When my wife is finished with the card after receiving it, I collect it and hide it away.  I use the "e" card every even-numbered year, and the "o" for odd years.  No way can she remember the card from two years ago.  They are, however, getting a bit tattered, so I tell her I buy my cards at the vintage store.

My wife has endured more than most wives would tolerate.  Within two months of our wedding, I received a draft notice from Uncle Sam during the height of the Vietnam War.  The biggest argument we have had in 41 years occurred that autumn, as we tried to decide how to play out this dangerous situation.  I wanted to take the military draft, which required two years of service, and she insisted that I enlist for three years in order to get some choice in my military assignment and, hopefully, reduce the chances of going to war as an infantry grunt.  I took her advice and ended up in Korea instead, where she later joined me for a rich experience.  Within 12 years of getting married, we lived in Virginia, Maryland, Ohio, Arizona, Oregon, Washington, Oklahoma, New York, and Korea, thanks to the U.S. Army and the pursuit of my education.  A few years later, we added Costa Rica to the list.

We rented a small house in Korea (our daughter was a baby then), which would fit into the kitchen/dining room area of our current house.  It had no usable bathroom inside or out, and the only running water was a cold water spigot in the gated yard.  We relieved ourselves into a plastic pail, which our Korean mama-san emptied each day outside.  We went to bed every night hoping that the rats fighting overhead would not fall through the paper ceiling into our daughter's crib.  But we learned a lot about life, made many friends, and came away stronger than we went in.  Our daughter's first word was "sei", the Korean word for bird.  My friend and roommate from college was not so lucky, and lost his life in Vietnam after having seen his newborn daughter only once. 

After completing my Ph.D. years later, I accepted my first faculty job at Oklahoma State University.  We arrived there with two kids, an English Setter, and a cat, and had no place to live.  A friend at the university found an unoccupied trailer at the edge of campus for us to use until we found a better place.  It had not been lived in for a couple years, so it was full of dust and cobwebs and spiders about half the size of your fist.  It sat right out in the sun (it was August), and it had no air-conditioning.  That night, we went to bed and lay there with sweat rolling down our faces and I said: "Honey, we have arrived."  We laughed so hard we almost got sick.  But it was then that I realized that the following American cliche may not be as true as we are led to believe: "if you work hard, and you're honest, and you get a good education, then life will be full of tangible rewards".  It is to someone's benefit for us to believe and follow that advice, but to whose benefit exactly?

In the mid-1980s, I got my first sabbatic leave from Cornell.  We decided to spend that year in Costa Rica, so I could learn more about tropical biology.  We rented a farm in Monteverde, a remote village in the Tilaran Mountains.  Because my wife had to quit her job to go, and I had to go on half-salary, we were broke the entire year we were there.  Finding food for a family of five was a real challenge because the local pulperia only got fresh vegetables once a week, which were totally gone two hours after the doors opened that morning.  The nearest town was Santa Elena, about three miles away, but there wasn't a great selection of edibles there and we had no car.  We finally bought a horse for transportation, and that changed the mobility equation quite a bit.  Robin dealt with traumatic injuries for each of our three children that year (broken bones, horse accidents, serious infections) and kept us fed, in a house that we later learned was called The Scorpion House by the locals.  Robin was the only one stung by one of our little friends.  We returned to the U.S. after that life-changing year with $50 to our name and all our credit cards cancelled, so we drove straight through from Florida back to New York, where we lived in our Coleman camping trailer for a month until the lease ran out for the family that was renting our home.

Robin has worked every year of the 41 except for three, and always worked to within 24 hours of giving birth to each of our three children.  She invariably got a job as a nurse within a day or two in every place we lived, then sold real estate, then worked as a marketing director at a life-care facility, and now works from home as a medical abstractor.  Like most women who are mothers, she is the lioness that fiercely protects her cubs, and she has been steadfastly supportive of my goals.  She has won every major argument we have ever had about how to proceed with aspects of our lives and, in hindsight, she was right every time.

When young people ask us what is the secret of staying happily married for so long, we honestly don't know what to say.  I suppose that loving and respecting your mate as much or more than you love and respect yourself, if that is biologically possible, is a key ingredient.  In a previous post, I mentioned that my wife and I have almost nothing in common, but when it comes to the big issues (e.g., kids, politics, religion), we are on the exact same page.  And then comes humor and laughter.  As we did in that sweltering trailer in Oklahoma 30 years ago, we have laughed ourselves to sleep over some event of the day literally thousands of times.  I believe a sense of humor is absolutely essential to making it through this life.

And so now, I will give my wife a kiss on the forehead while I distract her a bit, and collect her anniversary card with the little "o" on it for use in 2011.  Then, Robin, her sister, and I will travel to the Turning Stone Casino for a day of entertainment, and to make our financial fortune.  Now that is a laughing matter.

The missile has landed: my sister-in-law arrives for a visit

(DrTom, about to pick up his sister-in-law at the Binghamton airport.)

Yesterday I picked up my sister-in-law at the Greater Binghamton Airport, whose name is larger than the airport.  The airport has one gate and one luggage carousel.  At the food counter, you can buy bagels or taco chips.  The men's urinals are so narrow and so crowded along the wall that you have to stand sideways to urinate, facing the back of the person standing next to you.  Obviously, all men should face the same direction, but very awkward, nonetheless.  There is only one car to rent there, so you have to wait until it is returned before you can use it.  Did I say the airport was small?

When I picked up Susie, I went dressed as you see in the photo above.  I went to fetch Susie alone, because my wife is on a strict deadline with her work.  I wanted to be sure she found me, and I did not want to pick up the wrong sister-in-law.  After all, I have only known her for 43 years, but I have not seen her in a few months.  She could have grown a couple of inches since our last meeting, she might have dyed her hair a different color, or she might have lost her freckles.  You just never know in this era of extreme makeovers.  Twelve people got off the plane, so it only took us minutes to find each other, thanks to the sign I was carrying with her name on it.  I spelled her name incorrectly on the sign I was carrying (I never had to write her name before), but it was close enough for her to understand. 

On the way back to Danby, I drove through Apalachin, Owego, and Candor, to give her a taste of our Southern Tier communities.  We stopped at the little market in Candor for some canning supplies.  I bought the last two bags of sugar on the shelf before the elderly lady in front of me could bend over to get them.  We also needed ascorbic acid, but "We don't sell no stinkin acid in here.  Why would you want to mix acid with your pears?"  I didn't have the energy to provide a complete answer, so we moved on before that elderly lady caught up to us.  I really needed that sugar.

We arrived home safely, but exhausted from dealing with a regional airport and the Candor market.  After our frog walk and tree identification session, I let Susie rest before we went to dinner in Ithaca.  And the trip to Madeline's Restaurant constituted another exciting adventure, which I will describe someday.

Susie is coming

(A mosquito on human skin.  Don't worry Susie, the mosquito that carries yellow fever will arrive in Ithaca due to global warming, but not for another three decades.)

Tomorrow my sister-in-law arrives from Cleveland for a 3-day weekend.  You all know what this means, right?  It means that my wife can not possibly be on the phone with her sister in Ohio, because her sister will be in New York.  The significance of this is that I could cut firewood this weekend in safety.  You will remember that my wife insists that I take the landline phone with me, which has an intercom feature to the house.  If I get in trouble, cause there are some "widow-makers" out there in the woods, I am supposed to call the ex-ER nurse for help.  Normally when I try this safety feature, the line is busy because my wife is talking to her sister in Ohio, so I would bleed to death, or whatever.

But my sister-in-law will not let me cut firewood this weekend, or mow the lawn, or weed the garden, or do any productive work.  She is coming to have a good time in Danby and, dammit, we will show her a good time. 

I have many activities planned; I hope she likes them.  First, we are going for a frog walk late Saturday morning.  I have a nice variety of species on the property, and they are quite interesting.  Then, we are going to work on our tree identification.  My sister-in-law only knows a few trees, but we have several dozen tree species native to the Danby area.  I have an extra field identification book, Susie, so don't bother to buy one in the airport. Saturday night will be very special.  I found a dead raccoon by the side of the road a couple of days ago.  Because Susie is an Operating Room nurse, I thought she might enjoy comparing the internal anatomy of this common mammal to that of humans.  Should be very instructive, and the raccoon was not all that bloated.  Sunday morning, we go birding in a nearby swamp followed by a breakfast at Dan's Diner, where eggs, bacon, grits, and home fries only contain 52 grams of fat.  This "fuel" will give us plenty of energy to take a leisurely hike through Poison Ivy Hollow in the evening.  Just before our walk, I will show her the site where our gas station used to be before it burned down, and we will visit the abandoned IGA store a short distance away.  It is fun to look through the big window at the IGA; I can show you where the ketchup used to be stocked on the shelves.

Best of all, you don't need to bring anything special, Susie.  I have plenty of calamine lotion, tick repellent, and iodine for scratches.  Then, at the end of the day, we can sit in our woods and enjoy a nice cold V8 together, and see who can find the Big Dipper first.  I can hardly wait to begin!