Work

There is the kind of work you do that has an end: a sinkful of dishes, sweeping the kitchen floor, scrubbing the fingerprints off the door jamb (I don't think I ever do that).

There's the kind of work that eats you up so that you forget you have feet, eyes of your own, children even: working the beehive, working in the classroom, performing onstage.

There's work that you do with joy because you nest it among the things you love: mowing the lawn while blasting the soundtrack to My Fair Lady at dusk, paying the bills with a good cup of Chai tea, doing a boatload of dishes with a friend who really has something to say and an amazing ear for the listening.

Then there's that bottomless sort of work that threatens to pull you down with it: a case and a half of tomatoes, a huge bag of onions and forty jalapeno peppers that ask to be salsa'd in the day before you fly to Kansas at four a.m. the next morning.

You look at that kind of work and you wonder: How? How am I going to get that done? My Fair Lady is to friendly and fair, no one seems to have the ear you're wanting to share with, and it is impossible to pace yourself with landmark "endings" (I'll give myself an hour to do the tomatoes, thirty minutes for the cilantro...), because you really and truly have no idea how long any of it will take, whether you have all the correct amounts of ingredients the recipe calls for (my God, you'll kill your family with botulism if there are two too many peppers), and if, in fact, you contain the moral fiber to get through a job that contains so many unknowns.

The tomatoes wash like this: one shiny under the running tap, two so little dust, really what's the point, three how deep is this basket of tomatoes, four it doesn't really matter when I'll never see the bottom, five inhale, six exhale, seven inhale, eight exhale, nine there's no other way, ten exhale, eleven....

But onions are bound to make you cry. And after you cry, you realize that all the confusion that sat planted in your mind, in your heart, was just a boulder waiting for gravity and a rain of tears to send it slowly onward, downhill, and with a whoosh, you find that there was meaning, there was peace in your relationships with all those people you were afraid to call while chopping.

You call them to you, tell them about your celebrations, your fears, your confusions, and they listen and share their own. It's all the truth, and then there is an end to tomatoes, to peppers and to onions (lo! those friends shared your table and a knife, chopped beside you). There is an end to cilantro and garlic, and while you forgot to purchase bell peppers (you never could grow them), the store is still open and you can stop there on the way to picking up the kids from soccer.

Everything falls into place in that cosmic gospel way and everything makes sense, everything comes together so that you can see it all has an end, all a point of closure for celebrations and mournings.

It somehow doesn't matter if the salsa ever gets finished, though it will, of course. And we will keep picking up our work again and again, harvesting, preserving, and searching for the things that feed us.

Because it's good, work.  Yield: 16 and a half quarts.