The summer months stretch before me, teasing me with their promise: hot days under the blinding brilliance of the Tiffany-box-blue Australian sky; restless nights tossing beneath a light cotton sheet as an open window tries to capture the breeze; dry dead grass crunching underfoot; lizards sneaking inside and darting back and forth along the cool kitchen floor. Summer – even with this endless drought – still brings forth abundance: the winter oranges and mandarins slowly leave their place of prominence in the green grocer’s, replaced first by berries, then stone fruit, and finally, boxes and boxes of firm, ripe tomatoes.

As a child, summer meant canning: Every year my mother would sigh as she pulled out the big canning pot, declaring, “This will be the last year for canning.” Then she would go out into the garden – in my memory it stretches on forever, although it was never quite that big – and gather up the berries, the cucumbers, the stone fruit or tomatoes or apples. Or my grandfather would visit, with boxes of apricots and peaches. Or, more rarely, we would traipse to the pick-your-own places, and come back with fresh produce and stained mouths and fingers. And then she would start the process of peeling, pitting, chopping, boiling, bottling.

It blurs together, those months of her slaving in a hot kitchen to put up produce for the winter: My sister and I would dart under her feet to grab apple peels from the stainless steel sink, but surely this is June and the apples don’t come on until September, August at the earliest? There are the jars of dill pickles – always my favourite, I could eat an entire jar at a single sitting – but why are they next to the jars of tomato relish? But this I remember: the sticky kitchen floor – although my mother mopped it every night during those long weeks of canning, it always seemed sticky; the look of happy exhaustion on her face – for all her threats to stop canning forever after one last year, she is at it still; and the promise of a jar of strawberry jam that did not seal properly.

Last year, my husband, inspired by a jar of tomato relish we purchased in Tasmania, bought a box of tomatoes and set about duplicating the recipe. I came home one night to a kitchen covered in tomato mess, my green cabinets streaked with red, the wooden benchtops covered in pulpy tomato flesh, and a Dutch oven full of tomato relish bubbling happily on the stove. After several batches of tomato relish – each a bit different to the one before, none of them made with an exact recipe – he tackled fruit chutney: apricots and peaches and nectarines combined with vinegar and sugar and curry and spices to create a sweet-sour smell, pleasant with a hint of something else, something less pleasant, simmering just below the surface. That inspired me to try a failed attempt at pie apples; a more successful attempt at apple butter; and a batch of zucchini relish, so disgusting in colour I can’t quite bring myself to taste it.

On Sunday, knowing that the last couple of kilograms of a box of pears were slowly going bad in the bottom of the fridge, I pulled them out, peeled, cored, and chopped them, and tried my hand, for the very first time, at jam. Inside I felt part of a grand tradition of jam making – my great-grandmother, my grandmother, my mother, myself, bending over a hot stove to reduce fruit to jelly. Inside I also felt guilty, as if I was an underling usurping the queen: My mother’s jams and jellies were flawless, how could I pretend I could do as well?

In the end there were six small bottles of jam lined up on the blackened top of the old wood cook stove: pear-plum, spicy pear, and one spicy pear-plum, made by combining the remnents of the two together because there wasn’t enough of either for a full jar. I waited anxiously to hear that reassuring Pop!, that comforting sound that they would not kill us when we opened them in six months’ time. I made some toast, spreading some leftover jam – still hot – on a piece of buttered bread, and enjoying the fruits of my labor. And I thought: I have done it. I have joined in that grand tradition of matriarchs.

After my husband successfully put up his jars of tomato relish – much sought-after in the neighbourhood and by friends and family alike – I wrote to my mom to tell her that he’d enjoyed the process. She wrote back, “I always like canning. Anything else is gone too quickly: you bake bread or make cookies, and they disappear; you clean the house, and it just gets dirty again. But with canning you can look at the jars lined up on the pantry shelf and know you have created something that will last, at least for a few months.”

Sunday evening, as the each jar sealed, I held it up to the window and looked at the light as it filtered through the jar: deep purple, honey gold. I looked at the lead glass on the dining room hutch and thought how I had captured this coloured glass in a jar and made it edible. I stacked them in the pantry next to the most recent batch of pear chutney, and stood back and admired the effect: the browns of the chutney with its visible chunks of translucent yellow onion, the rusted red of the tomato relish, and this new addition, the stained-glass colour of jam. A painter’s easel lined up in straight lines all along the shelves of the pantry. Perhaps the naïve jars with their hand-printed labels lack the sophistication of the commercial cans with their brightly-printed pictures and fancy fonts. But the cold modern cans lack the warm comfort and memories of the home-bottled goods. Who is fond of the memory of their mother opening up a can of Cream of Mushroom soup?

Outside the birds are chattering away, the lizards and snakes are waking from their hibernation, and the fruit trees are blossoming their welcome to the warmer months. Inside, I am planning my summer’s canning: perhaps this year there will be jewel-bright jars of pears and apricots; maybe this year I will find that elusive decent salsa recipe. The summer and the sunshine beckon; and so does the fruit, waiting for my amateur hands to turn it into something that will last, hopefully, through the long winter months. I think of my mother’s hands, soft and warm after decades of experience with bottling, and with the tasks of changing diapers, wiping away tears, giving service. As a teenager I used to think with some element of contempt: Why doesn’t she get a manicure? Now, I think: May I be so lucky to have hands like hers.