The tomatoes came in all at once, the way they do when you've got a garden and a grudge. Three weeks of nothing and then every vine on the property decided it was time, and I was out there in the August heat with a bushel basket and the kind of optimism that only a person who has never properly canned tomatoes should have.

Marlene said I should watch a video. I said I had watched my grandmother do it forty years ago and retained the general shape of the thing. Hot water. Jars. Lids. Tomatoes. How complicated could it be for a man with a college education and a full set of teeth.

I want to be clear that I followed most of the steps. The altitude adjustment, I'll be honest, I did not fully understand, and the part about the acidity I skimmed because the tomatoes were already acidic — you could taste it — and it seemed like the kind of footnote people put in to protect themselves legally. I sterilized the jars. I believe I sterilized the jars. The water was very hot and I left them in there for what felt like the right amount of time, which I now understand is different from the correct amount of time.

All forty-seven came out looking beautiful. That dark red. Sitting on the counter in rows while they sealed, each one making that little pop like a tiny period at the end of a sentence I had written and was proud of. Marlene said they looked wonderful. Our daughter came by and said they looked professional. I labeled them with a paint marker — JOHN'S TOMATOES, AUG — and lined them up in the basement like a man who had done a thing.

We ate from them all winter. Soup. Sauce. A chili that won a significant amount of praise at a neighborhood event I don't need to name.

The doctor's appointment was for something unrelated. Blood pressure, routine. And I happened to mention the canning because I was proud, because it had been a good year, because I am sixty-four years old and I grew and preserved food with my own hands and I wanted someone with a medical degree to acknowledge that this was a fine thing.

She asked some questions. Clarifying questions, she called them. About process. About the pressure canner versus the water bath. About times and temperatures. She had a look on her face that I have seen before, mostly from Marlene, and she said she wanted me to know that the symptoms of botulism could take anywhere from six hours to ten days to present and that the neurological effects were, in her words, serious but often survivable with prompt treatment.

I asked her to define most.

She said it was not a technical term in this context.

I drove home and sat in the driveway for a while. The family is fine. Everyone is fine. Marlene had a headache in November that lasted four days but she gets those. My son-in-law missed two days of work in December but he works in an office and those people are always getting something. My mother-in-law, who ate three bowls of the chili at that neighborhood event, spent a quiet January, but she is seventy-eight and January is hard on everyone.

All I'm saying is the tomatoes looked beautiful, and we ate well, and the doctor said *most*, and I have decided that *most* is enough for a man who did his best.