The jar

For Claudia - my mother in law. From Bristol, Virginia to Florence, South Carolina, to Atlanta, Georgia and full circle to Lexington and Virginia again - just like she wanted. Love you (but won't be actually saying that out loud because, well, I'm British and funny like that). xxx

A Ball preserving jar, in its original lucent aquamarine beauty, lay in a flea market in Virginia. It was tucked into a somewhat scruffy area of kitchenalia and vintage aprons, but it was pale beauty and the colour of the best sea glass and Flora wanted it at once. After that, she bought them everywhere she could in the South and took them home, where the sea light from them reflected a subtle light on the stone around her kitchen windows. Or she gave them to friends, who filled them with glass marbles and treasures - always remembering to set them in the light, she said, because of the watery sea colour and the delicacy of the embossed script: Ball. Perfect Mason, they said.

The jars she had bought, stallholders told her, were mostly 1950s and bought from house and farm clearances over the South. What might a Virginian farmer's wife of that time have thought of Flora's collecting these jars, supposed to be tough and practical and used for preserving? Exactly what her own mother would have thought, Flora decided: that if something is lovely and practical, it does not stop one from noticing its beauty. Her own grandmother used to pause before she shut the door of her huge Somerset larder just so that she could admire the big jars of pickled eggs and onions and cabbage and the preserved damsons, apples and plums from the trees in their garden. The satisfaction of good housekeeping. And what if the jars themselves were glowing, too?

To see the jars in a Wiltshire or a Welsh kitchen made her husband happy. Because they were the jars of his childhood, in which grandmothers in South Carolina would preserve their vegetables. Flora longed to see a Southern pantry of these jars, all filled up with, maybe, bread and butter pickles. But she wondered if they showed their fine colour, all used as their makers intended, but housed in a cool and shadowy room. So she compromised. Today, half the jars are in the kitchen window, with the shafts of light cutting through them; the others house pickles. Watermelon this time of year, in honour of the place that made them.

Ball still makes the jars. These days they are clear and a little more square and a little less sensuous and you can buy them for a few dollars in Walmart. Flora won't be buying any of those.

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Note from author: yes, I do collect these jars, as I do kitchen items and aprons from the Southern United States.