My father’s hoarding escalated from eccentric quirk to health hazard sometime in the ’70s. Five-foot-high stacks of newspapers began to appear along rabbit-warren pathways through his house about a decade after my mother left him, taking me and my two younger sisters with her. The precarious constructions presented an obvious threat—death by unstable architecture—but it was the caches of stale-dated food, bought on the last possible marked-down day of saleability then tucked away, sometimes for years, that worried me most. He must have had a stomach of cast concrete to survive the insults to freshness jammed into his cupboards, root cellar and multiple freezers. Much of it turned to waste; the hoarding—stocking up for the hard days ahead (he was raised during the Depression)—overwhelmed purpose and sabotaged utility. His food stashes became a parody of plenty. Decay can’t be cheated.

The grammar of family is often parsed in food, and soon after my father died I became obsessed with pickling. I had a ready supply of home-canning implements. My father had avoided clearing out my grandmother’s house when she died; for 35 years, he procrastinated (hoarding’s enabler), preserving her place in Woodstock as a domestic mausoleum. As co-executor of my dad’s estate, the task fell to me. And so in a period already rife with upheaval, I spent weeks sorting through the musty remains of my grandmother’s life, discovering a basement full of pickling paraphernalia: hundreds of jars in torn cardboard boxes, drawers stuffed with rubber sealing rings that turned to dust as I picked them up.

My mother made jelly when my siblings and I were young. We loved the days when the kitchen steamed with boiling fruit, masking the smell of her cigarettes, and she heated paraffin wax to pour over the jelly as a seal. The house seemed so full of purpose: this wasn’t the mother we sometimes came upon crying as she made our beds; this was our mother of late-summer sun and possibility, quietly humming as she stirred the pot. The bushels of fruit turned into sweet spreads for our toast, the astringent grape skins and sour apples transformed into treats. She let us play with the warm sealing wax, forming cloudy white creatures that we rolled in our hands. Later, when the jars had been stored at the bottom of the basement stairs, we’d break the rules and play in there, poking at the wax seals until they came away from the jars. Our games were careless, brief moments undoing hours of effort. Maybe that’s the thing about mothers and daughters: fragile seals are so easy to break.

I stopped speaking with my mother soon after my father died, feeling that our old grievances—hers and mine both unleashed by his passing—couldn’t be resolved. Though she’s still alive, we have little contact. That’s loneliness for you, but it’s beyond personal. So much knowledge is lost in the broken relationships of mothers and daughters. Maybe this is why I wanted to pickle: to hoard abundance rather than waste it, like my father did. To fill the absence of a father and a grandmother gone. And to transform my mother’s and my past into something new.