Word: cannings
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...bringing out old-fashioned ingenuity along with the complaints, evoking a pioneer atmosphere in which acquiring victuals is once again an important matter even for the affluent. Kirsten Lumpkin, the wife of a Seattle construction man, bought a side of beef in company with some neighbors and has been canning her own fruit. "It's unsettling," she said last week while preparing to make sauerkraut for the first time in her life. "All of a sudden, eating has become sort of a focal point, and I think that...
...Berkeley, Anita Davidsen, a graduate student's wife, looks at it differently. "Now," she said, after learning to grow and can vegetables, "I can imagine how satisfying it was for great-grandmother-over a hot stove all day but socking away 30 quarts of whatever. I'm canning things to give away as Christmas gifts...
...state's beverage canners have been hardest hit, because customers are reluctant to pay deposits on cans and are buying more bottled products. One Eugene firm, Emerald Canning Co., has shut down; California's Shasta Beverages, which distributes its drinks in cans, is also suffering financially in its Oregon operations. Bottlers complain about the cost of picking up empties and retooling plants to wash and refill them...
...Canning's story is brisk, but one cherishes his characters. Blanche Tyler, a blowsily sensual gypsy medium, is commissioned, innocently enough, to locate Shoebridge as the heir to a fortune. Amiable George Lumley, a garrulous middle-aged failure, does Blanche's detective work for a fee-and a night in bed. Then there is Miss Rainbird, a conventional spinster and country heiress out of Jane Austen...
...story sometimes suggests James Bond in the 19th century. Blanche practices a tacky spiritualism, but Canning never quite debunks her ghosts. A spirit world flickers on the edges of the plot. The precise rationalism of government investigators softly edges toward the ambiguous realm of séances and contacts with the dead, like a drunk motorist drifting off the road. The total effect is eerily absorbing. At the end, Canning's story is a bit tricky and brutal, but it is somehow charming all the same, and even persuasively ominous...