The Pickle Jar

My father loved pickles. When the jar in the fridge was empty, there were always a couple more waiting in the basement pantry. Once, after a day of running errands, I came home to find the pungent tang of pickle juice filling the rooms, and my dad unperturbedly drinking a cup of coffee. As he raised the cup to his mouth I noticed fresh cuts and scrapes covering his hands.

 "Da!" I roared, leaping out of my chair, for this was the sort of calamity I envisioned every time I left the house. 

"What happened to you?!"

He looked at his big, butcher's hands with the always immaculate fingernails of which he was so proud, turning them over as though he'd never seen them before. 

"Beats me," he shrugged.

I was incredulous. How can this be? I leave the house for a couple of hours and come home to find my bull of a father injured and oblivious? We both looked to my mother for some kind of clarification; she prodded him to no avail, and finally explained that, obeying a particularly fierce pickle craving, he had ventured into the basement for a jar of pickles but decided to make it a two-jar day. Heading back up the steps, he fell backwards in a pickle jar melee that left the stairs running with pickle juice, his head banged about, and his hands bloodied. 

By now, of course, my caregiver fears were confirmed. I must never again leave the house. Had my father's dementia not erased the memory of that trauma, my guilt and remorse might have been much worse. For once, his illness worked in both our favors, and for that, I was thankful.

When my dad died there was a jar of pickles abandoned in the refrigerator, his pickles, that neither my sister nor I could bear to toss. It remained there for five years, pushed to the back of the shelf, but always there, at once comforting and chastising, sweet and sour, the memory of our deepest love and our darkest imagining.

Menna

2016 August 27