To all the kitchens I've loved and left
It's nostalgia week
To the kitchen in the single-wide trailer in Elko, NV:
I sat at the table and watched my mom make risotto in the pressure cooker. My brother and I scuffled and laughed; we were younger than ten. Four, then five of us lived and ate there once my second brother was born. My mom organized a food co-op, and we would bring back a cut of a gigantic rectangular block of cheese, a portion from huge bags of rice, millet, quinoa, and Mason Jars' worth of loose peppermint and yarrow leaves. A poster on the wall next to the table was a collage of edible flowers that felt life-sized. I ate my oatmeal and thought of the rose, dandelion, calendula, hibiscus, and chive.
To the closet-sized kitchen in the 100-year-old farmhouse in Dalton, PA:
I shook heavy cream and a marble in a glass jar, making butter as a science experiment for my homeschooling. My brother shook a jar with only cream. The bottom of my jar broke off in a near-perfect circle, and half-whipped cream fell down my favorite jeans, a pair with pink flowers embroidered at the hem and up the side. This kitchen saw my first creative attempts at making sweets and my disastrous messes (which I've written about before.) In quiet rage, I spent what felt like hours to my 11-year-old self washing dishes, staring out the window over the sink. Memorizing the green pasture, the trees lining the creek bed, the bridge over the creek my brothers and I always held our breath when crossing, and the hill on the other side of the bridge. Less than a year after we moved from this house, a forty-year flood wiped out the bridge, uprooted my favorite trees, and I felt that it was no longer mine.
To my mother’s childhood kitchen in Scranton, PA:
This love is redacted. I feel vague pressure to love the orange laminate countertops and the sloping floors and to credit it with formative cooking memories. But it is more accurately the site of wished-for love, almost-history, and dry pot roast.
To the beige kitchen in suburban Apache Junction, AZ:
At thirteen, I learned to cook for my family of six in this kitchen while my mom was postpartum with my youngest brother. Lasagna, meatballs, pasta sauce. Casseroles, mac and cheese, French onion soup. Rice pudding, tapioca pudding, bread pudding. Cakes for birthdays: Tres Leches, Tiramisu cake, vanilla with boiled chocolate frosting. Abusing the power of knowing where all the ingredients were, making secret snacks for myself, and sending my two middle brothers out of the kitchen with shrieks of irritation.
To the kitchen, I shared with roommates in Tempe, AZ:
It was late, after midnight, and we brought the last wrinkling lemons in from the tree. I squeezed them into a jar while she scoured the kitchen for alcohol. It was disgusting in the end, but it got us drunk enough. We peered into the freezer at our other roommate's shelf and worried about her stacks of diet meals and her increasing thinness. After one too many nights getting home from work to find my thrift-store appliances dirty, I cleaned in a fury and started locking my blender, food processor, and whisks in my room. I left a passive-aggressive note on the fridge, letting the house know where my items were located.
To my high school best friend's family's kitchen in Mesa, AZ:
At all times, half a dozen 2-liter soda bottles were on top of the fridge, and there was a dedicated candy cabinet. It was everything my comparatively crunchy, whole-food-conscious mom wouldn't allow, and I loved it. Helping myself to the family's tub of Red Vines by the handful, ignoring everything I knew about Red 40 dye.
To the kitchen in the 490 sq ft apartment in Pullman, WA:
The freezer froze over, and my husband chipped at it with a knife until we could close it again. We were newly married, and I was pregnant and nauseated constantly. He made curried salmon one night, and I escaped to the stairs outside, crying. We hosted Thanksgiving there, only a few months into the graduate program, while everyone in the cohort was still getting used to each other, the school, and the town. Fifteen or more people squeezed into the apartment, and we ate a hodgepodge meal, grasping at community.
To the 1970s galley kitchen I just moved out of in Tempe, AZ:
I painted her turquoise just last August, thinking we would stay a while, not realizing yet that we'd sell the house. My husband and I bought this kitchen by the skin of our teeth in 2018, eking in through a first tax return with two children and before prices skyrocketed. We had people over, trying to figure out how to own a place when we know that ownership is a fiction. I made pot after pot of pasta sauce, often mediocre, but the point was sharing. Then the pandemic hit. I obsessed over making marmalade and candied orange peels and preserved oranges, possibly thinking that if I could keep up with the orange tree in the backyard, I could escape for a moment. Escape isn't really possible, but marmalade on toast with butter is delicious. Five years in this kitchen feels like a lifetime after being used to moving around so much. It's just a space, afterall, but it became an extension of myself, and as I said goodbye, I thanked it.
Reading: Under the Henfluence: Inside the World of Backyard Chickens and the People Who Love Them by Tove Danovich. I’m still listening to Sense and Sensibility, and Jane Austen makes me literally laugh out loud with regularity.
“Elinor agreed to it all, for she did not think he deserved the compliment of rational opposition.”
“I have not wanted syllables where actions have spoken so plainly.”
“Brandon is just the kind of man whom every body speaks well of, and nobody cares about; whom all are delighted to see, and nobody remembers to talk to.”
I’m deceased!
Writing: That same essay as previously mentioned, but after some help from Chelsea via the Morning Writing Club I feel less confused about how to proceed. A flurry of pitches, fingers crossed.
Cooking: Not much to report again, but I’m thinking about making a bread pudding soon. The bread scrap bag in my freezer is full and I don’t care that my stove heats up my kitchen. Do you have a favorite recipe? I want something decadent.