Jars, Cans and Soap Slivers
16 January 2024
“Empty yogurt containers,” Aunt Janice muttered in disgust to no one as she opened one of my mother’ supper kitchen cabinets looking for some sort of serving dish. We were in the Alabama house and my mother’s family was gathering there in December 1999 for Uncle J.W.’s funeral. The cabinet in question truly was filled with nothing but empty store containers of some sort, mostly, but not exclusively, yogurt. It was odd. But I grew up with it.
During my entire childhood, my mother saved every conceivable container. Glass jars ranging from gallon-sized pickle jars right down to the teeny tiny things in which pimientos are sold. All must be saved, labels soaked off and stored. The same with coffee cans, peanut cans, or any plastic container that came with a lid. All must be saved. Styrofoam trays that held pork chops or hamburger meat from the grocery store. All must be saved. Also soap slivers. Mom would not use a bar of Dial soap once it was washed down to that skinny sliver that slips out of your hands into the bath water below. But no sliver was to be thrown away. Mom stored those golden bits in the plastic bags that held the morning paper on rainy days. She secured those bags with used twist ties saved from every loaf of bread she ever bought. All must be saved. The soap. The bags. The twist ties. Everything must be saved.
Obviously, Mom was a child of the Great Depression. Still, it was out of hand. She had to keep the mixer, blender, and the waffle iron in the den because the kitchen cabinets were so full of empty containers. But it wasn’t just the Depression. Over the years I realized that the containers were puzzle pieces in a game she played with herself. As one could imagine, no food could be thrown a way either. No amount of uneaten dinner ever was so small that it could go in the trash. At least not until it was growing green fuzz in the back of the refrigerator. The game was this. My mother had an uncanny spatial ability to pair any portion of leftover food with the perfect size jar or plastic container. Mom could store leftover corn in a jar that fit it to the kernel. And she always had just the rightsized container for any job.
She didn’t do it the way I do it, dirtying three separate storage containers that are too big or too small before I give up and spoon the leftovers in to a bowl that I shove inside a Ziploc that I’ve washed and dried 63 times so I can continue using it for this very purpose. No, my mother got it right the first time, every time. After a big family dinner, I’d bring her the jars and she’d fill them up. “Janice, this one’s too big, there’s a smaller one in there in the living room, it has a red top on it, you know the one that had plum jam in it from the Winn Dixie down at Tyrone Shopping Center.” “The Winn Dixie where the store clerk didn’t believe me the day I asked her to page Mrs. Dees because her house was burning down?” The conversation went like that until I finally produced the required jars.
It was an amazing talent with no possible means for monetization that I could ever imagine. Sort of like my husband’s super-recognizer skill. But that’s a digression I won’t take. Here.
Now, we are finally getting to the action part of this story. My parents went to Alabama and left me home alone when I was in school at St. Pete. Junior College, a block away. I hated all those stupid containers. Why couldn’t my mother have Tupperware like everyone else? Left by myself, I went through those jars and threw away all but two in every size. When my mother and father got home, Mom was so mad she could spit. “Janice, what have you done with all my good jars?” When I confessed, she looked at me as though I had pawned the family silver. (Of course, we had jars, not silver.) In my defense, I protested, “Mom, I left you two of every kind, just like Noah and the ark.” Ina tone that conveyed equal parts outrage and weariness, sheleveled, “Jars don’t multiply, Janice.”
This was untrue, of course, as was neatly proven by the expanded collection of jars and cans Mom curated and tended to over the subsequent forty-odd years she lived in the house. As I was combing through it all, filling the smallest moving Pod with the nostalgia-laden items I thought Bobby and I might possibly want, I gathered up every single coffee can I could find from the several locations around the house and garage in which they were stored. Twenty-four coffee cans total. Was she right? Was there something I could do with them? An art project of some sort, maybe? What madness was it? Nature, nurture, both?
And that question brings me back around to my Aunt Janice, who sneered at the empty yogurt containers in Alabama. I feel the need to “tell on” my aunt, as my mother would say. One summer after my dad died, when I was in Alabama to pick up my mom and drive her back home to Florida, she asked me to go with her to Tuscaloosa to visit Janice, who had developed cancer and wasn’t doing well. While we were there, I looked under the sink in the bathroom for some toilet paper. Behind it, I saw an old tin can overflowing with Dial soap slivers. I had to laugh.
