Cans and Canning

 Yesterday morning I looked out the window and saw water spurting and my son and husband shoveling frantically. “What’s that?” I hollered. “Turn off the washing machine,” my husband said, “now!.” A few minutes later when I got outside and checked the damage for myself and asked how long the little sewer creek had spilled across the lawn, my husband said, “it was just gray water.” My son said, “Mom, sometimes the planet has to suffer.” Seriously, it was only  a minute, not enough to make mud, and it went toward to the driveway not the beach.  Erma Bombeck was wrong: the grass is not greener over the septic tank. Ours gets emptied so often that there is no grass over it. Just a gravel patch from the digging- and re-digging. Luckily, the guys at Haines Sanitation came right away and pumped the tank out and now we are good to go and there are no more bad smells in the house. Unless you don’t like fish. Once the “can’s can” was clean, and we  were all scrubbed, I began canning fish. As I write this I have one eye on the pressure cooker gage, while 32 pints of sockeye are cooling.  I’m counting winter salmon-salad sandwiches and salmon patties.  I’m numbering the days until the end of summer, and am in a sudden hurry to save as much of them as I can.