I spent most of yesterday canning, a tedious rigmarole involving huge heavy pots, scalding water, and 40 pounds of tomatoes. But, as always, the 14 scarlet quarts cooling on my counter make up for everything. They are beautiful; they are like money in the bank; they are September in a jar; and when February arrives and I'm shoving towels into the washing machine, I will look up at these quarts glowing on the shelf, and my eyes will rejoice.

Today I will make bread, freeze sweet corn, mow grass, edit a manuscript, prepare for a workshop, go to a JV soccer game, and think about history. I am engrossed in Paul Johnson's The Birth of the Modern: World Society, 1815-1830, which overlaps my western Pennsylvania project in more ways that you might think. Reading about the early frontier era is what jumpstarted the project in the first place, and this book is full of information about steam engines, road building, and the importance of the piano in the rise of the middle class during that very era, though of course it doesn't limit itself to Pennsylvania. Now I am itching to write a poem that combines pianos and steam engines. I just have to figure out who should be talking.

So as you can see, a day spent canning tomatoes is not a waste of literary time, no matter what the edgy magazine writers tell you.