The Canning Room

The wooden steps groaned under her footsteps as she crept downward towards the room.  Her bare feet eventually reaching the bottom of the stairs where they pressed onto the cold and dusty cement floor.  There they hung; thick gold curtains which she knew marked the way, once they were pushed aside to reveal what appeared to be to her six-year-old mind more of a science laboratory filled with creepy preserved objects of various shapes and sizes rather than the fruits and vegetables harvested from grandpa's garden.

The canning room had one lone lightbulb in which she had to pull the string attached with a safety pin to a metal ball chain that eventually attached to the lightbulb in order to turn it on or off.  Once she pulled it she had to jump out of the way because the string would fling back flipping this-way-and-that in her face until it decided to settle down making way for her to continue her exploration into the mysterious realm of canned goods and preserves.  Past the curtains, wood shelves lined the remaining three walls of the room.  It wasn't a large room, only 4 feet by 5 feet at most, but to her the shelves filled with the mysterious and bizarre items towered over her, looming and taunting her to touch one and watch the spongy items encased in the glass jars bobble and spin around at the slightest disturbance.

To the six-year-old, this was a room filled with items of intrigue and bizarreness; green pears, fuchsia beets, pale yellow corn, green beans, red tomato sauce with little white seeds and chunks of green pepper (a deal breaker if you wanted her to try it), all skinless and floating around in some mystery liquid that was not naturally found surrounding these items when she and her twin brother picked them from her grandpa's garden.  Staring at the towering walls of glass jars her head would start spinning at the strangeness of it all. Turning around she would quickly race out from behind the gold curtain, clamor up the wooden steps to the safety of grandma's kitchen where crunchy cucumber sticks, green onions and slices of sun-ripened tomatoes sat next to a salt dish and cold glass off southern sweet tea awaiting her.  The cold drink and crunchy, salt-dipped vegetables would bring her fully out of her world of canned mystery and back to her reality.