VIRGINIA BEACH - There’s the pan on the table. It looks old. It is old.

Cary Jarvis says the pan belonged to his mother, who was born in 1895, and before that it belonged to her mother. Now it belongs to Cary’s daughter, Thelma Peterson.

It is a cake pan.

It has crossed the Atlantic Ocean six times – three times going and three times coming back – between a home in Virginia and a World War II battlefield in Europe.

It stayed safe, and so did the soldier who landed at Omaha Beach on D-Day and then fought at the Battle of the Bulge.

“We’d think about things we couldn’t get there, like sardines,” Jarvis said. “We’d just dream up those things that weren’t perishable. I’d always ask my mom to send me a fruitcake, so she did. She’d tell me, 'Don’t worry about the pan.’ ”

But he knew it was the only cake pan she had. Jarvis would send it back to her. Packages sometimes traveled faster than letters, because letters had to be read and censored before delivery. When the pan would arrive back home, Emily Jarvis knew her son was still alive, somewhere in Europe.

Three years she did this. Three Christmases away from home. Always the same fruitcake.

There’s the recipe on the table.

It looks hard to read. It is hard to read. She jotted it down in pencil on the back of an envelope. The measurements are in half-pounds and dashes. Cary Jarvis has no problem reading them. He says the ingredients cost $25 to $30 now for a single cake, baked in oiled brown paper that lines the blackened pan with two cracks in the fluted rim.

There’s the fruitcake on the table.

It looks good. It is good. It keeps for a long time without spoiling. That’s good, too, because this cake has a journey to make. It’s going to Iraq. Justin Aesch­liman is the son of a friend of Peterson’s, and he will appreciate a trans-Atlantic fruitcake. This year, though, the pan is staying home.

Diane Tennant, (757) 446-2478, Diane.Tennant@pilotonline.com [1]