Over a hot stove

Over a hot stove


Standing over a hot stove, my grandmother stirred the guavas. She’d spent all morning washing them, peeling them and scooping out the seed in the middle. The pink thick meat halves she had placed in her big speckled enamel pot. Now the burner on the white gas stove was going full blast and the guavas and the water and the sugar were beginning to bubble.

Guavas always ripened in the early summer which meant that the kitchen in the big two-story Sears & Roebuck frame house would be hot by ten in the morning, and with the guavas boiling down to a thick syrup it was murderously hot in that kitchen. But Grandmother whistled between her teeth as she stirred a little tuneless sound that I believed could only be made if you wore dentures like she did. While I stood in the doorway to the outside trying to catch a breeze, she held her spot over the hot stove, stirring and stirring to keep the guava mixture from sticking to the bottom of the pot.

The wide mouth Mason jars were lined up on the kitchen table beside her, and the lids and rubber seals sat on the drainboard behind her, already sterilized with boiling water. Everything about canning guavas involved heat. Even when my cousins and I had picked the fallen guavas up from the ground under the trees in the back yard the day before, it had been hot.

Years later, when my father would reminisce about his mother’s canned guavas, and go on and on about how you just can’t get good food like that anymore, I thought about the heat my Grandmother endured to make those treats for her family, and how that heat was matched by the strength of her love for us.