Home has always been in the kitchen. The different kitchens of my life mark time and categorize whole eras. The before and after of the “kitchen addition” in my adolescence was a chaotic summer full of digging holes and getting to “sweat a pipe” which probably isn’t what you’re thinking. Young adulthood as thrust upon me as I outfitted my first outside the family home kitchen with highly mismatched plates. Kitchens where I scrambled eggs and chopped vegetables and talked and learned and spilled things on the floor. When I first started college I was feeling the least homey ever in my rather depressing housing situation and at least part of that was because I had a tiny kitchen. Counter space was sparse and the kitchen itself was located in the darkest internal corner of the house where no natural light would even glance. Food prep had to take place hovering over the sink. It was not a happy time, it was a rough transition into a new role, and the kitchen remains a symbol of that loneliness and too many dinners of microwaved baked beans. This was the only kitchen I have ever brought a cardboard briefcase full of White Castle hamburgers into. To strum English tenses, if my life goes according to any of my plans A-Z this will always have been the only kitchen I brought a briefcase of fast food hamburgers into.
My kitchen now is so, so far from that dark and sunlightless place. The spring sun streams through the windows and my soundtrack is the jingle-jangle of the dog’s tags as Gideon runs up and down the hall, entertaining himself with his spiked blue ball. He has long ago gutted it of the internal components, or else my background would be both jangles and squeaks. I have all the counter space I could desire, and I am so happy to be puttering by myself in this space. The giant copper-covered island in the middle of the kitchen glows with light barely filtered through new leaves on the enormous silver maple just outside. I have just used the last of the bananas for banana bread. I even found the one hidden banana in the freezer and smashed that one up too, for a lumpy mess of batter that is in the oven and starting to smell delicious.
I’m trying to pin down the sense of deep and supreme happiness I have tonight. At least a teaspoon of this contentment comes from getting to refill the sugar and the salt jars, an act of pouring from large containers into smaller ones and making things into the size of daily use. My household is full of people who relish consolidation, the two jars of jam become one, even if mixed berry and strawberry aren’t quite the same thing. This participatory, side-by-side living brings me so many moments of joy, pouring salt and anticipating that others will get to shae in its use. Glass lip to ceramic, a little toast of “prost!” to future dinners and cooking smells and shared pots of coffee as we leave the house at staggered times. Perhaps not simultaneous, but parallel lives as we each stop to talk to the cat, and stroke Gideon’s head before lining the salt and the sugar canisters back up on the counter, leaving space for those that will come after us.
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