Canned

I am sitting on the couch in my lamp-lit living room in a sketchy suburb of Seattle. It's that time of night when I ought to have been in bed for a couple of hours, but instead I'm playing On the Scale of Motherhood, How Bad Am I? to the scuffle of raccoons outside my window. My three children are asleep, lulled by motoring cars and my youngest daughter's big-tonsilled snore. I've checked and rechecked the door locks, and between lines and paragraphs in my reading of Didion's Slouching Towards Bethlehem, I'm doing the math to figure out if any of my kids' car seats are expired. I don't realize I need to reread the page I'm on until I'm in the middle of a quarrel with myself about how much is too much when it comes to harassing my son about paying attention when he runs across the street to his bestie's house. This particular anxiety invariably brings to mind Raymond Carver's "A Small, Good Thing," and I've got to put Didion away and look for something to distract me before I go down that dark road.

From the couch, I can see five bookshelves that need to be anchored to the wall, which we've done religiously in every house we've lived in until this one. I get up, pull a paperback from a tightly packed shelf, and wonder just how hard I'd have to pull to be crushed by a mountain of books. I grab the frame of the bookshelf and try to shake it a bit. Then I imagine how bunkbeds might behave in an earthquake and wonder if at the slightest tremor we'll all crash through the floor into the concrete slab of the garage below us.

Under the low bar in my kitchen, I can see a collection of half-gallon jugs of darkened, sugared honey in rows on my makeshift pantry—single shelves from a deceased book case I've set up under the countertop. The shelves are held up by tall, uniform cans of oats and tins of hot chocolate mix. In my coat closet, there are five heavy-duty, waterproof seventy-twohour kits. One of my kitchen cupboards holds fifteen jars of applesauce (with reusable seals!), another cupboard holds twelve jars of home-grown tomato pickles, and under my bed, you'll find thirty-two jars of jam—all of which I canned myself.

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Did you ever eat astronaut ice cream? That freeze-dried crackle sponge—a most specific consistency—off-white, like egg powder. It could be squished into a tiny porous brick. A brick that somehow has enough milk product in it to leave a slimy film on the inside of your mouth.

When I was little, my mom saved up a stack of Raisin Bran box tops and mailed them in for a store of astronaut ice cream to put in our seventy-two-hour kits. Growing up in a ranch house on a seven-acre corner in the middle of Kansas nowhere, we had a bedroom in the basement dedicated to food storage. Stacks and stacks of golden number 10 cans maraca'd to the brim with hard red wheat, powdered egg, rice, salt, dried milk, macaroni, cheese powder, hot chocolate mix (a Mormon favorite), sugar, rolled oats. We had tens of gallon jugs of vegetable oil down in that room and hundreds of MREs—peanut butter, spaghetti, meatballs, some beige chicken-rice goop—tidily packed into smallish cardboard boxes, like books.

MREs were developed by the military, but I suspect they've survived on Mormon sensibilities. They're little Mylar pouches of rations meant to be easy to carry and life-sustaining in times of war and post-apocalyptic Utah. You really haven't survived unless you've lived on ten-year-old spaghetti from a pouch.

Our honey always came out of a quart jar, dark brown and sugared. Shaking her head, mom would say, "it's not even all that old and already sugared." She'd soak the jar...