stuff in The kitchen …
My kitchen, where treasure is …
heart will be also
Got up this morning to make a pie and I got to thinking.
I was using my rolling pin that I have had for years and I posted a photo it on facebook with the question, “Name something in my kitchen that hasn’t been washed in 35 years.”
What did I mean actually by saying ‘my kitchen’?
Did anyone in literature every write a better sentence on kitchen’s than EB White did in Charlotte’s Web when he wrote, “The kitchen table was set for breakfast, and the room smelled of coffee, bacon, damp plaster, and wood smoke from the stove.”
And I thought about kitchen’s in time past for myself.
My Mom lived in the same house in Grand Rapids, Michigan for over 50 years.
I can still say the phone number that started 363 (or if you are really old, EM3 when the city used ‘exchanges’).
There was a kitchen that was the heart and soul of a family.
As there were 11 kids in our family, the kitchen was huge.
Had a island with a 4 electric burners AND a metal surfaced prep counter that by itself was a big as most kitchen islands today.
They was a butcher block ‘sandwich’ counter at one end of this vast wrap around counter that turned into a breakfast area with kitchen stools on one side and then the dining room table that you could land a plane on.
Mom’s kitchen was quirky.
Mom had wooden bread box and the side that opened had a hair trigger.
If it slipped when you opened it, or sometimes all on its on, that side would fall fast and smack the counter with a band like a gun shot and made everyone jump.
The oven, somehow, gave off a AM Radio signal.
If you were in the car and someone was listening to a ball game on the radio, when you pulled into the garage, the radio would start giving off this low buzz buzz buzz and you know something was in the overn.
In her later years when she got a little forgetful, I would often drive over to see her and hear that sound and know that I should go in to turn the oven off for her.
Not hard to visualize Mom on an almost daily basis (Wednesday was prayer meeting so to give my a break that was night we went to McDonalds. Back then we ate in the car and two of the older boys would walk to the window to place the order. They would come back with a tray of drinks and hand to Mom who would then take a sip and say Coke Coke Root beer and pass them out. My brother Pete and I got out this by ordering the Orange Drink.)
She would take a break from the never ending laundry and walk into the kitchen and start frying up pans and pans of pork chops or stir and giant kettle of spaghetti sauce or peel the 10lbs of potatoes she would need for the evening meal.
In one corner of the kitchen was a tall under the counter cabinet.
It was in there that Mom kept the 10 different kinds of cereal we demanded.
Cheerios, Frosted Flakes, Sugar Crisp and Cap’n Crunch.
The Cap’n Crunch was for Dad who liked to sprinkle a handful on his vanilla ice cream.
Then over under the butcher block counter top was a giant two drawer cabinet known as the ‘cookie drawer’ where every kind of cracker, cookie and snack anyone ever heard of was kept.
As we were Dutch, there was always a box of Rusk.
An old friend of mine named Gordon Olson once said he never doubted the business acumen of the Dutch as there were able to sell boxes of stale bread by calling it rusk.
Almost more than the contents of the cookie drawer, what I remember was how the Grand kids eyes would go big whenever they discover Grandma’s Cookies.
They would stand there and almost cry as it was so hard to make a choice of ‘just one’.
Come Thanksgiving Day, Mom and the kitchen when into high gear and enough food to last Laura Ingalls Wilder’s family in their little house in the big woods through the entire winter.
Pots and pans and baking sheets piled up.
Food piled up.
Plates and glasses piled up.
That, folks, was a kitchen!
I realized that there is a big difference between ‘the kitchen’ where you live and ‘my kitchen’ which means more, ‘What’ not ‘Where’.
In the short story, “The Man Who Gave Up His Name”, Jim Harrison writes that the man in question had “In the trunk there was one suitcase, one box of books, and one box of assorted cooking equipment he could not bear to part with in his urge to travel light.”
One box of assorted cooking equipment he could not bear to part with.
That, for me, up what I mean when I say, My Kitchen.
I am happy to say that my box of cooking equipment includes utensils from my Mom’s kitchen.
We have lived in a dozen different homes since getting married and the The Kitchen always changes.
But in that kitchen, I will spread out the one box of assorted cooking equipment I could not bear to part with and once again, I am in my kitchen.
I am reminded of the Bible verse at Matthew 6:21, that says, “For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”
For me, where my rolling pin in, there MY kitchen will be also.
No Haiku For You 