jar

When going to the cabin, it was always a good idea to bring food along, or stop in town on the way in, and stock up. There was usually some food in the kitchen, but it was hard to tell how good any of it was. The canned food was questionable because it had usually been frozen in the winter and thawed in spring. Any boxes of cereal or pancake mix might have a little hole in the bottom where mice had gnawed through, and there might even be a mouse nest inside. There's nothing like pouring out some corn flakes, and instead of a little toy surprise in the pack, some shredded paper, mouse droppings and an old dried mouse skeleton.
You could usually count on sugar though. There was a large jar of sugar with a lid. Grandad said there might be pre-war sugar in that jar, since people would just kept adding sugar over the years. I told my dad about that, and he said he cleaned the jar out one time in the fifties, so it was all post-war sugar.
When grandad, uncle Bill, Ross and I went up to the cabin in the early eighties, we stopped at the IGA grocery store in Phillips and bought food for a few days. We had a cooler, but the ice wouldn't last indefinitely, and the gas refrigerator hadn't worked in years, so we got mostly things which didn't have to be refrigerated. A staple lunch item that doesn't need to be refrigerated is peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. There might have been half a jar of peanut butter and/or jelly at the shack, or maybe even two half jars, but even if there was, it might have been rancid, or otherwise undesirable. Grandad bought, among other things, a jar of peanut butter, a jar of jelly and a loaf of bread.
We got some ice for the cooler, and I think it was the first time I had seen block ice for sale. I was used to seeing only crushed ice or cubes in bags, but crushed ice melts a lot faster than a large block. We got a couple blocks of ice for the cooler, which didn't leave too much room for food, but it lasted a lot longer.
When it was time for lunch back at the shack, grandad called my brother and me in and told us to get the bread, peanut butter and jelly and bring it out to the table. We made ourselves peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and ate them, then he sat down and made himself a sandwich.
I went and sat down on my bunk to try to organize some of the things I had gotten out of my duffel bag. A few minutes later I heard a clinking sound from the direction of the table, like metal on glass, but I didn't really think anything of it. The sound continued for a little while, and I wondered what it was. I looked over at the table to see grandad using a spoon to scrape the last of the jelly out of the jelly jar. I wondered how the hell he had used up all the rest of the jelly and looked to see if he was making another sandwich, but he wasn't and as he put the last spoonful of jelly into his mouth, I realized he had just eaten the remaining jelly a spoonful at a time.