I've been helping to clean out my father's house, which has been rather overloaded in the past 10 years or so, with items from Irving Place, from my great-grandparents who originally owned the house, from the store that my dad briefly owned, and other sources of accumulation.

This weekend, one of the places I tackled was the basement. There was shelf after shelf of glass jars that my great-grandmother had saved for canning. Some of them still contain food (the oldest is from 1969--I haven't worked up the courage to touch that one yet, but I think it contains blackberries). The Bell, Mason, and Kerr jars are very nice, and will be spared my cleansing wrath, however the majority were old Miracle Whip, Skippy, Grandma's Molasses, and other commercial product jars. I had already started tossing out jars on my last visit and had sent about three bags worth to be recycled. This time around, upwards of 5 bags full made their way to the dump. It seems as though every glass jar that came into great-grandma's house made its way to those shelves. Lord spare me from that kind of thrift.