The Kitchen and Me, One Last Time

As I was preparing Sunday dinner today, it occured to me that this would be the last time this kitchen and I did battle together.

The house has been sold. Next weekend my Sweet Lady Wife and I will be on a long-deserved (particularly for her) vacation in Reno, NV. Closing will be the Tuesday after that. So today is IT.

Don’t get me wrong. In five or six weeks we’ll be in the new house with the new kitchen: Lots of cabinets. Corian countertops. A real pantry right off the kitchen. Lots of electrical outlets. Room to store my mixer and food processor and condiments someplace other than my Den. I am looking forward to that more than you know.

THIS kitchen however, is where I learned to cook. Learned to saute. Learned to make Beurre Blanc. The kitchen that made Coq au Vin for five generations of women in my family on Mother’s Day last year. The kitchen where I made my first Thanksgiving dinner — solo. The kitchen where I learned my knife skills.

I remember when Adam challenged everyone to send him pictures of their kitchens and I was the only one to respond and he wrote a rather flattering post about me and my kitchen.

It is a kitchen right out of the 1970’s, isn’t it? My Sweet Lady Wife and I picked out that wallpaper shortly after we moved in 31 years ago. We went to a wallpaper class and then I hung that wallpaper myself. There are lots of other memories in this kitchen too. Down low (about eye-level for a five-year-old boy) near the refrigerator are two small 1/4-inch diamter holes in the drywall. I was fixing something somewhere in the house with a hammer one day long ago. I heard ‘I’m fixing too, Daddy” – accompanied by a tap-tap-tap eminating from the kitchen. It wasn’t until hours later that we found my son’s handiwork 🙂

And of course we’ll always laugh about that small grease fire in the oven.

So there is some sadness in saying godbye to this kitchen.