My grandmother kept a cupboard she called the just-in-case, and for most of my childhood I read it as a harmless eccentricity rather than what it was — a wound made edible. She had been a girl during the Depression, and somewhere in her twenties she had learned to keep tinned beans, sacks of flour, jars sealed with wax and paper, all of it rotated with the humourless discipline of a quartermaster provisioning for a war that had already ended but might, at any hour, resume. Nothing in that cupboard was ever eaten first. It sat at the back of the shelf like a private insurance policy against a world that had once taken everything from her family and could, she believed, do so again at a moment’s notice. [Read More]
