The pantry was the size of a large closet, maybe four feet deep and six feet wide, but Mama kept it like a bomb shelter.
Canned green beans arranged by date, oldest in front. Sugar in the same glass jar it had always been in, sealed with a rubber ring she replaced every January. Coffee filters in a yellow Tupperware container that had lived on the second shelf since 1993, the lid faded to the color of old cream. A row of spices in alphabetical order, which had always struck me as something between organized and sorrowful, the discipline of a woman who needed one corner of her life arranged exactly right.
The flour tin sat on the top shelf.
White enamel with a blue pattern around the rim, chipped in three places from decades of being taken down and put back up. It was the kind of tin that comes with something inside, biscuit mix or cocoa powder, and gets repurposed after the original contents are gone, the label worn off until only the shape of it remains.
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