The Old Pressure Cooker

When I was growing up, my parents always had a huge vegetable garden. In fact, most summers they had two.....one at our house and one at, what we called "the homeplace," which was where my dad grew up (he leased the place from my grandmother and farmed it, ran cows on it, and had  the second garden).
I remember that the garden at the homeplace had the LONGEST rows! I hated picking beans or peas there. It seemed like the rows were endless!
And all summer long, my mother would can vegetables in mason jars using the old pressure cooker that her mother had used. I never learned how to can vegetables. I never paid attention. Now I wish I would have. I only know how to freeze or preserve in a hot water bath.
Maybe one of the reasons that I never wanted to learn back then, was the fact that the pressure cooker that my mother used SCARED ME TO DEATH! You have to understand, this thing was old....her mother had used it all of her life, then it was passed down to my mother. I remember something about a pair of pliers and some pot holders on the top to "fix" something that didn't work right. But, my greatest memories are of the NUMEROUS times, as a kid, that my mother would yell, "The pressure is too high! RUN!!!" And we'd take off out of the house and look back, praying that there wasn't an explosion. This happened AT LEAST once every summer. Of course, it never did explode, but the fear was always there.
So a few days ago, while rummaging around in my parents old garage, I found it....the old pressure cooker!

The lid says, "Automatic Hot-Shot Master Cooker" and it weighs a ton! Several of my friends told me that it would be so neat if I used it to can vegetables like my grandmother and mother did. Ummmmmm......NO. First of all, I don't know how (but I'd love to learn with my own pressure cooker someday). And second of all, this thing scares me! 

So, I cleaned it up and found a nice home for it above my cookstove. It makes me smile every time I look at it.