For many years it represented everything about what it meant to want to cook. A large, pale blue enameled kettle with a prominent chip in the white lining.  It was not a pot to inspire pride, and yet I loved it.

I bought that fine blue pot for my first solo apartment in Montreal.  I had found the place in time-honored fashion by walking the streets and looking for signs announcing “à louer.”  When I knocked on the door it was answered by an enormous man whose voice and accent sounded like shouting no matter what he had to say.  Later I learned that he and his aged mother owned several buildings on desirable streets in the Plateau and were rumored to be far richer and far cleverer than they cared to appear.  On summer evenings the landlord would sit on a park bench across from the house, smoking with his cronies and accosting anyone who attracted his jaundiced eye with ebullient, if boorish commentary.  “Why don’t you marry her?” he demanded of my not-yet husband as we walked past, “Can’t she cook?” In my mind, the apartment resembled a hobbit hole, tiny, half below ground, with a bright green door.  It was like a 1/10^th scale-model of a real apartment, including a doll-size kitchen with just enough space for a miniature table and two chairs. It was dominated by a 1940s refrigerator shaped like a bomb, with a hanging freezer that made frost but never froze.  The gas stove was narrow with a bottom broiler in which I made toast – a perilous task requiring precise timing and a high tolerance for the acrid smell of burning bread.

I found the pot waiting for me

at the Salvation Army on Notre Dame where I also bought most of my furniture, as well as the woolen coat that I washed in the bathtub and which took nearly a week to dry.  The store is still around, located in big brick factory building with wooden floors that creak under the weight of winter boots and multistoried windows that let in grey light filtered through decades of grime.  The door to the street opened into a long room filled with clothing and bric-a-brac.  It had the sour odor peculiar to cast off things and a musty warmth that was at once comforting and repellant.  Kitchenware was in the back on rows of metal shelving: dim glasses, unmatched plates, old toasters, and hand-cranked egg beaters that looked like the fossils of ancient fish. Upstairs were looming rows of dressers, tables, listing bookshelves and over-stuffed chairs with missing legs.  The remnants of lives up-rooted or gone suddenly wrong.  It was an Aladdin’s cave of almost-treasures that filled me with nostalgia for childhood days spent roaming second-hand stores, garage sales or New England church bazaars that occurred regularly before the holidays or after spring cleaning.

The first thing I remember making in my majestic blue pot was sour cherry jam.  I had never made jam and I had never seen a sour cherry, but I found them on sale at the dingy and over-flowing Greek grocery around the corner.  If you have never pitted a cherry, please imagine a tender murder, an operation at once delicate and bloody resulting in a spray of pink stains on clothing, exposed flesh and walls.  Having survived the melee, I piled the cherries in the pot, added sugar, turned on the heat and then … I phoned my sister for information.  “Just let it boil until it jells, you’ll be able to tell.” Well, it did boil, but I couldn’t tell and the finished product was a sort of sour cherry taffy whose tang and chewy heft makes my mouth water even now.  The colour was a luxurious Tudor rose with an ineffable aroma of almond and the tannic edge of a soft red wine.

In the years that followed my pot and I grew wiser.

Every spring we made asparagus soup and every July the children joined in and we made strawberry jam.  In August the pot disgorged tomato sauce made with onion, carrot, basil and a few pepper corns thrown in for spice.  In October it simmered apple butter to the color of dark fall leaves, sending up belches of steam that smelled of cinnamon and lemon peel and a hint of clove.  Sometimes the pot overflowed gleefully when boiling spaghetti or when asked to hold one too many ears of corn.

Finally, my beloved pot began to show signs of age.  Sauce stuck, sugar burned, oil smoked too soon.  I found a replacement and left the soft blue kettle by the garden gate where any abandoned thing will disappear in a matter of moments.  And she was gone.  This was long ago, maybe ten years, maybe more.  But I feel an ache of grief as I write it. It was hard of me to put her out, my companion who had served so well and so long.  I hope that someone took her in.  I hope that someone holds her and fills her and that she breathes out a whisper of what I put in and the magic and the power we created together.