The Boiling Water Revelation

I signed up for the workshop on impulse. The flyer was taped to the community center bulletin board, the same board where I once found a flyer for the pottery class, and the words 'home food preservation' were printed in that particular font that community centers have used since 1987. Twelve dollars. One Saturday morning. I figured worst case I'd learn something mildly interesting and be home by noon.

Here is what I did not expect: to be the person in the room who had to quietly reckon with the fact that I had been boiling water wrong. Not metaphorically. Actually boiling water. The instructor, a very calm woman with a laminated binder, explained the difference between a rolling boil and what I had apparently been doing my whole life, which is bringing water to a point where it looks like it's about to do something and then calling it done. I wrote it down on the handout. I underlined it twice. I did not make eye contact with anyone for a few minutes.

Inspecting the jar like I knew what I was looking for.

The part nobody tells you about a class like this is that it doesn't really matter if you ever preserve a single thing afterward. I'm not canning tomatoes this August. I have Gerald on the windowsill and the collapsed bowl and a sketchbook full of bad rectangles, I do not need to add a shelf of home-canned goods to this apartment. But I left knowing something I didn't know before, which is a feeling I keep chasing in small ways. The mason jar is still on the counter. I keep looking at it like it's trying to tell me something.

The handout. The jar. The beginning of knowing nothing.