This First Person column is written by Jan Rose, a writer who lives in Calgary. For more information about CBC’s First Person stories, please see the FAQ.

Above the L-shaped kitchen cabinets in my condo, there is a one-foot space where I’ve stashed what seems like enough pasta — elbow macaroni, fusilli, spaghetti — to feed the entire Italian army.

That space holds nearly a dozen boxes of cereal, bags of oats and various other dry goods — emergency rations that have likely gone stale but still give me a sense of comfort in the knowledge that I will never actually