My mother, Helen, was a child of the Depression. That expression, “child of the Depression,” has little meaning today, as our collective memories of those years fade, twittering into obscurity, with all those who lived it having left us or now in their late nineties. There were certain ingrained fears common to that generation: fear of no work, of being fired, of having no money, no resources, no food, of being evicted, or of having your property repossessed, of not being able to provide for your children. During the Great Depression, over 25 percent of the country’s work force was unemployed. As a point of reference, the highest level of unemployment during the Great Recession, 2007 -2009, was a little over 10 percent. To them, those born in the Roaring Twenties, these fears were rational, and everyone should have clear-eyed respect for these eventualities, as the world was (is) transitory and nothing was (is) for certain. They tried to be prepared for disaster. They saved, they worked at anything, they canned food.

I never ever called my mother “Mother”, and until late in life – I found it was too late in life – I called her Mommie, until that one day at my buddy Willie’s house after listening to the new Rolling Stone’s album when I called home on the rotary phone and asked, as a sixteen-year-old, “Mommie, can you come pick me up?” and Hazel, Willie’s mother, a big woman, round, like an above-ground stoned colonial well, said, in pure hysterics, with a voice that could etch crystal, “He calls her Mommie!” Well, not after that. That was the last time. Kids have different rates of maturity and mine was, in many respects, principally delayed.

Henceforth, I called her Mom.

We had a tempestuous relationship, at best. It was just one of those things. Our wills clashed, is the best way to leave this topic, for now. She was about 5 feet tall, one hundred pounds or less, and with the willpower of tempered stainless steel. (Is stainless steel tempered? I don’t know.) Except when it came to smoking. She always smoked. And when she was in the hospital dying of cancer, she had the willpower to get to the bathroom down the hall for a secret smoke. There was no stopping her.

My mother knew each of her kids was very different, and she compartmentalized the things she did with each of them: music with Deb, study hall with my brother, God knows what with Beck, and with me it was gardening and canning. Many other things, too, of course, but let’s simplify.

I was the kid with the garden down on Gram’s old plot and I grew a lot of tomatoes and Mom taught me how to can them and we had those days in the kitchen, in the steam, and with smell of pots of tomatoes with onions and it was simple enough and the work showed immediate results as the glass Ball jars lined up on the red linoleum countertop in the well-lit farmhouse kitchen. Usually, it was days like this with the sun in retreat and rain dripping from the cold maples and on a weekend, as she was a teacher. In between work on cutting the tomatoes, I would finish my homework at the round kitchen table with the view of the river. The boiling water, the deep canning pot with the lift of wire frame for the jars, she was adept with potholders, and unlike her mother, she rarely wore an apron, except when baking, but one hung on a nail on the back of the door of the broom closet right there next to the fridge.

We canned more than tomatoes, and she pickled things too, and when the cling-free peaches came in over at Dolan’s Orchard she would take me there in her big crazy station wagon where she could barely see over the dashboard, and we would buy a full bushel basket of them and can peaches into quarts. But the real trick, the real reward with peaches, was saving all the pits and skins and bruises and slipping them into a big cheesecloth which we would hang from the knob of the cabinet with the liquor, and we would let the peach drippings drip into a big Revereware pot and then add sugar and boil that down into peach syrup. A treasure. A treasure from the Great Depression. Waffles, or homemade pancakes, Sunday morning, butter and peach syrup. The world really may have been better then.