A dozen Ball blue Mason jars, a canner,

and crates of peaches later, my brother's headed

to Sharpsville. Grandma, disbelieving, asks,

You're coming here to learn to can when Kroger's

got everything year-round? She laughs a trailing

laugh: Oh Lordy. My brother presses. I know,

he says, it’s strange. But he wants to be prepared

for Peak Oil, and more than that he wants

a way of keeping things around, if not

by memories that come with work, if not

by these than by the blanching, boiling, bottling.

But the Can it! piece that headlined last month’s Times

is proof he’s not alone. Our generation

cans plums and onions, rabbit and octopus:

can it so it can be with you forever.

I help my brother load his car. I nothing

but understand. I saw a show on hoarders,

their homes stacked ceiling-high with crap they just

can't bear to toss: their armpit shavings, lint,

extinguished fireflies. The saddest case

was the man who couldn’t part with mossy biscuits

from his mother’s long-past wake. I think of him

trembling at the dumpster, knuckles as white

and wet as pus. How can I do it? he whispers.

How will I remember? Because, of course,

that strange cerebral cellar is never good

at keeping things just so. (We lost our grandpa

to his heart this year—our memories are at once

steadfast and porous, a fist and water trickling

through it.) Napoleon said An army marches

on its stomach so France imagined up tin cans.

Their openers were thirty years away

and soldiers had to hurl the cans at boulders,

to stab at them with bayonets. I wonder

what it does to a man—what’s clung to, what’s

maintained—to know the food in those damn cans

might well survive the war unchanged.

Jessica Love is a postdoctoral fellow in psychology at University of Illinois. Her creative work has recently appeared in The Southern Review, Sycamore Review, and The American Scholar, where she also writes a weekly blog about language and the mind, Psycho Babble.