Judy P's Tickle Trunk

It all started with an old French door that led to nowhere. It had once led to a passage to a back room but now it opened onto a space the width of a paperback, which contained the plumbing pipes to the bathroom. Someone had embellished the door by placing coloured cloth behind the panes, suggestive of stained glass, but it was not very convincing. It would have been difficult to make anything look good next to the thick dusty-rose paint. I proposed replacing it with more lustrous fabric. Lance agreed but added “I always thought it would look nice with pictures of jelly jars behind the glass”. The idea fixed itself in my brain like the claw of a cod jigger on the upstroke. Aha – a birthday gift idea! I don’t think Lance had any idea of my passion for home-canned foods. My mother canned everything from wild rabbit to rhubarb relish. (She never called it canning, after all it was being put into bottles, not tins. Thus it was called bottling; in Newfoundland it was pronounced by replacing the Ts with a quick closure of the glottis) I learned from Mom and “The Joy of Cooking” how to make my own preserves. There was nothing I enjoyed more than inhaling the steam from a pot of rich red boiling raspberry juice from my own berry patch. If one did it just right by boiling  just the right quantity of juice in just the right size pot to just the right temperature until it reached just the right consistency with just the right amount of sugar (enough to sweeten the tea of all the retirees in Victoria, not a grain less) one could make perfect jelly without benefit of pectin. One year, before I had mastered the technique, I boiled my juice on a humid day and as a result we spent all one winter enriching our desserts with raspberry sauce.

strawberry-rhubarb jam

I recall the satisfaction of one particular day of canning: I had the jars capped and cooling on towels , my raspberry stained apron flung carelessly over the back of a brown kitchen chair, and I was sitting curled up in  an armchair embroidering pictures of raspberries on a thin white cotton blouse. Suddenly there was a distinct, tinny “POP” from the kitchen, and then another “POP” “POP”, “POP” as the jars sealed. The peak of satisfaction came later when just before bed I checked the lids and found one not sealed. As I gently laid my index finger on the cap it recoiled like a sticky sibling from a stray elbow in the backseat of the station wagon after a hot day at the beach. “POP”. Before I stowed them safely in the dark cupboard, I lined them up on the windowsill for a couple of days so that I could enjoy their sunlit jewel-like consistency through the hatched glass of the jar. I was sometimes overwhelmed with a sense of security knowing that  I had enough jelly to last the winter – no matter how tasteless the bread or how dry the bagel it could be saved by the addition of summery gelled fruit.  I digress.

study for 'Pantry' chalk pastel on newsprint

The picture took a couple of years of all too short summer weekends to complete. I was terrified by the size of the piece. Prior to this I only did tiny paintings because I was so miserly over my paint and paper. What if it didn’t turn out and I had to waste three dollars worth of supplies! What if it didn’t turn out and I couldn’t find that brand of paper again or that shade of red paint? What if I had to start all over again – it would take me twenty years to finish! Oh, the drama. The bravest thing I ever did (art-wise; sailing adventures to follow) was take that door-sized piece of masonite and apply my first brush-stroke of acrylic paint. I don’t think I drew a full breath until the thing was done and hung….to be continued

Early 'Pantry' - base of acrylic on masonite