Today I canned. I am a canner. I am one who has canned.

This is a big deal for me. Since becoming a stay-at-home mom I’ve realized that other women my age in my own neighborhood are terrifyingly domestic and know how to use food dehydrators and pressure cookers and can their own produce that they grew and hand-picked in their backyard. Their food storage shelves are lined with glass jars filled with delectable edibles, packaged with love.

I’m not quite there myself, but tonight I did can some wheat and sugar. While I didn’t exactly tend the wheat fields or sugar cane plantations myself, I helped put the lables on the tin cans before someone else dumped the wheat and sugar in for me. That’s close, right?

Our relief society borrowed the canner from the local cannery and ordered the supplies for us, so all we had to do was show up with a check and then assemble and seal the cans ourselves. It took a couple hours, but now we have nearly 100 cans of red wheat, white wheat, and white sugar for our food storage. If something bad were to happen tonight, we could subsist on wheat grits and sugar for six months! Although we might clear our pantry of the Little Debbie’s first.