Aunt Cecilia did her own canning and was a hoarder from way back when. She preserved everything from zucchini to venison to watermelon rinds. Her basement walls were lined solid with mason jars. She salted away caseloads of Green Giant French-cut green beans and Del Monte fruit salad. To say she was provident was like saying Death Valley gets warm. She never threw anything out.
Ever.
She was a plump little woman, as round and soft as a dinner roll; but her husband, my Uncle Jim, looked like a famine victim. He could hide behind a telephone pole. With all those groceries in the basement, I often wondered why he was so undernourished.
And then we went over to their house for Sunday dinner. I’d been there often to play with my cousins, but had never been invited to stay and eat.
“Waste not, want not; I’m using up some of my old preserves!” my aunt cheerfully explained, as she began serving us.
We started with some warmed up venison sausage that, Aunt Cecilia boasted, had been bottled in 1953. That was the year I was born. Uncle Jim nervously asked his wife if perhaps the sausage might be past its prime, but she gave him such a withering look out of her pudgy face that he subsided into complete silence for the rest of the meal. Following his lead, I only took a smidgen of the antique sausage. Once on my plate it collapsed into a gray paste.
“Saving room for the pickled radishes, eh?” Aunt Cecilia chided me jovially. She handed me the bottle of pickled radishes, on which was a strip of old masking tape, with barely discernible writing that indicated this particular bottle had been put up back in 1949, before the Korean War. I quickly handed off the bottle to one of my cousins when Aunt Cecelia’s head was turned, and he, in turn, silently slipped it under the table.
I noticed that both my parents were filling up on bread and butter, but when I attempted this my aunt stopped me cold by offering me a glass of tomato juice. The can she poured it from was rusted a uniform brown – the label apparently having peeled off many years before. I had never seen tomato juice with clots in it. I took one cautious sip and let the rest of it sit and subside into senescence.
We had canned and bottled carrots and green beans and even potatoes. Each item was murkier and muddier than the last. Luckily, I was known in the family as a picky eater, so when I stuck to just bread and butter, as my parents were doing, it was not accounted as a particular insult. But my poor uncle and cousins were browbeaten by Aunt Cecilia, encouraged to eat up and take seconds. My boyish heart, so often filled with nothing but selfish regard, went out to them in empathy as I contemplated the years still ahead for them of nothing but mummy dust.
Dessert was homemade applesauce, put up the year Ike began his second term. It did not look lethal, so I cautiously tasted some. It was absolutely tasteless, like eating congealed air.
When Uncle Jim and Aunt Cecilia finally passed away, I helped my cousins empty out the old house. When we reached the basement my cousins, who had been rather sluggish, suddenly revived and hurled away the cans and bottles as if they were live grenades. I managed to save a bottle of Heinz ketchup as a memento. The figure “1927” was etched on the bottom of the bottle, and the contents were completely black. The bottle exploded several days later when I carelessly left it in the sunlight on our kitchen table. There was tomato ectoplasm everywhere. It smelled of the Scopes Monkey Trial.
