Trendy Thrift

I’m filling the canning cupboard, but slowly. The horrifying financial news of the week has rekindled a fire underneath me and suddenly, canning isn’t a throwback any longer. It’s a contemporary necessity. The wolf is at the door, knocking loudly, and the threat of being just a little bit hungry is real (okay, maybe we won't literally starve, but certainly we'll hunger for extravagant tastes, expensive wines, and the fat ribeyes of yore). Thrift, which has been so out of vogue for my twenties and my early thirties, just became cool.

But let’s be honest: I haven’t exactly heard on the news that there’s been a run on canning jars. All that canning merchandise--the flats of jars and pectin, paraffin and Fruit Fresh--continues to sit forlornly on supermarket shelves. It is possibly the most ignored section of the store.

Sometimes, if I’m feeling down, I walk into the pantry, hold open the doors between my outstretched arms and take stock of the inventory, catalogued in the muted colors of the vegetable rainbow: buff–pink applesauce, the color of my childhood cockapoo; midnight-blue wild blueberry preserves, and the chokecherry syrup almost the same color but cast with a bright purple glow; ruddy plum sauce; foggy, brined dill pickles that look as if they've been sitting for years in an abandoned storefront window. I look at them and shift them around, replacing the front row with the prettiest jars. It reminds me of the way that I rifle through my old jewelry, caught up in a spacy trip to the past, the fruits inside the glass as vivid and shiny and commemorative as my old semi-precious stones and cheap, hideous pendants.