There are very few things I remember about our kitchen pre-renovation. Oak or else some other very bland wood panelling. Awkward crevasses above cabinets into which our cat would wedge himself tight. An oven with strange doors. I remember birthday cake at a central table much too small for the space and childish play on the seventies flooring. What did I know then of space or decor? Anyone with eyes could see how dreary it was. Yet the kitchen had synonymized itself with home, and I was attached to it, and I was uselessly frustrated when word got out that it was to be gutted.
I was eight or nine when my mom took my sister and I on a harrowingly long road trip to the south east industrial district to consult with the woman who would become our designer. Her name was Patricia, and she had a smart pixie cut, bleached blonde. She seemed to hum with the electricity of an artist. She made me feel very adult when she shook my hand, my other arm cradling The Prisoner of Azkaban. The consultation was either very long or very brief, and I was keenly aware even at that age of my mom’s fastidiousness (not to be mistaken for indecision) with design – I thought maybe this woman, as high-voltage as she was, would be refused like the several interior decorators before her.
My mom proved me wrong as she was/is wont to do, and Patricia became a scheduled presence inside our house. Eventually we’d exchange Christmas chocolates, and she would predict my astrological sign with a savvy I attributed to her artistry. She made decisions to which my sister and I were not privy, but which glinted tactically off our girlish proclivities. When she was invited to redo my bedroom, she delighted me by suggesting we colour wash the walls my very favourite shade of lilac. She permitted my entreaty for curtains around my bed and snuck my mom a fine-glitter spray paint to mist the ceiling where my lamp’s light would hit. She hung silky green drapes that would flit like columns of silhouetted leaves when summer wind exhaled through my windows. Whatever target practice she’d taken made had her keen. And more seriously, she beheld my mom’s own wishes like they were hers. She loaded my mom up with fabric swatches for late-evening deliberation in the TV room: dozens of colourful scraps needing to be touched to be understood, needing to be rearranged and rearranged again to be heard. My mom found patience and peace on these nights, kneeling before them like they comprised a textile shrine. This image of her is one of my favourites; it speaks to her gentle, thoughtful handling of beauty.
The renovation itself, once it got going, made it like coming home to a theme park where everything was sawdust and tarp. Carpenters and contractors were given keys to our front door and I imagined befriending these otherworldly labourers, developing an amiable kid-and-adult routine in passing. This was fiction, as it turned out, since there was not all that much to do in a kitchen upended, and the tradesmen were busy with their work. In the months the project took, I’d instead retreat to our reassembled family room downstairs, which in hindsight looked a lot like a dorm common area. Our microwave was relocated down there and heralded as the sole appliance, its throne some makeshift prep-table. We drank milk from plastic cups robbed from a patio set, and rinsed them in the bathroom sink. No memory whatsoever of the food we ate in this interstitial period (likely for the best), but in that halfway room our family managed to eat together, as we always did.
Near the end, there was a whole week we got to stay in a hotel while the hardwood floors were installed. We ate continental breakfasts before school like we were haughty tourists spending the winter abroad. We slept in two queen beds and kept oatmeal bars in the humble kitchenette, and it felt like slanted freedom for a moment. Though, there were several practical hiccups that made me yearn for our usual mundanity. One night, absent of our amply-supplied kitchen drawers at home, my dad had to sharpen a pencil with a pocketknife so I could finish my homework. And I remember the TVs in the hotel lounge were cycling news snippets of a tsunami in Indonesia. My parents talked adultly of the thousands of families displaced from waterlogged homes, of houses ripped from their foundations, of cars and belongings bobbing in the leftover waters. A grown-up imperative to be grateful seemed to swell in our rented room at dark, and so when we returned I tried to enjoy the smell of varnish that was everywhere, tried to find more profound appreciation under chandelier light.
There was no unveiling like I thought there might be, having seen my fair share of Trading Spaces. No Paige Davis to hold our hands, to mirror our expressions of shock and happy gratitude. Things were finished in piecemeal. We transitioned slowly back upstairs and I learned through touch and visual stimuli how our home had surpassed mere familiarity. It had already played tricks on my lexicon, merging bits of language to evoke informed comfort, but during the nights of our sabbatical it sublimated its importance into necessity. We as family members were facets of its corona, each strung together to embody its purpose. We belonged to the home now. My mom had picked the intricate backsplash behind the Wolf range and the matching indigo interior of the ovens. There were cupboards for every boxed snack our bellies could conceive of. We had a fridge that beeped (!!!) when it was left ajar too long. My dad resumed his cooking and I remember sitting at the remarkably large kitchen island, watching him stir frozen peas into macaroni (this preeminent dish would eventually be hailed “kitchen sink casserole,” a family staple). We had nice plates and cutlery that matched, and on more urbane occasions we’d pull out a drawer of all my mom’s chosen linens. It was an injustice even to call it heavenly, when the four of us were granted utility to our home’s transcendent treasures. We’d been given access to territory of the infinite; we felt somewhere in the ground wire of our family how the current predicted love in this room. We’d have an uncountable number of dinner parties with neighbours. I’d haul canvasses into the kitchen to free my nascent grasping at creativity. We would use the space for its intended purposes and wander after meals through the whitespace of limitless amenities. And stern conversations, at the dinner table, when appropriate. And raised voices between daughter and dad, each standing ground on opposite sides of the sink. And fifth-grade handwriting on my sister’s stationary, taped inside the cupboards, dictating which foods were “allowed” and which were not. There was happiness in this redecorated infinity, but inevitably sadness, smallness, guilt. The kitchen was our proxy for a love resistant to human quantification. All we could possibly do and feel, for ourselves and for each other, filled the space through an invisible leak which neither Patricia nor her contractors had the certifications to appraise.
And so my frustration at the onset of this project, this exposure of family care through ivory crown moulding, fell asleep and never awoke like the child of me did when I turned fourteen, when I started wearing eyeliner, when I no longer needed the window-adhesive birthday decorations my mom dug up every year and stuck on the glass of the kitchen doors. And this is okay; it was a girl fearful of change that resisted amendment to the space she thought was hers. She had very little residential imagination given how much her mind mellowed in fictional thought, never considering the possibility of comfort through a conduit of disruption. It seemed like all at once I turned into a semi-person and realized the perfection that had befallen us, went from worry to wonder. How I loved the kitchen for what it was for us. How within it, I grew.
Much later, on my summers spent away from university, I found a greater solace in my place around the table. I worked tens and had Fridays off while my family, now somewhat splintered, was distributed wide; my sister would be at school or at summer school, my dad would be out on the field in some obscurely-named Albertan town, my mom had her own kitchen in her rented apartment while divorce proceedings played themselves out. There would very often be no one around from the time I woke up to the lateish hour approaching dinner, when I’d hear the garage door open (its exact timbre one I can hear to this day) and my dad would come upstairs, a dejected part of him left elsewhere, to deliberate over what we should all make for food. On these Fridays I would languish selfishly in attempting the daily crosswords and make muddy French press by the litre. Leaning over the table, pen in hand, I’d choose between smearing newspaper ink on my elbows or letting my scant flesh surrender its meager heat to the granite countertop; depending on my choice I’d let myself out the kitchen door to sun in Calgary’s unwavering morning UV, or I’d shower and dress for the sake of being presentable for the walls that asked of me decency. These mornings were wonderful for their quiet. For lunch, I’d rustle around the kitchen and snack on Safeway croissants or sandwich meat, not particularly intent on fixing anything special. Then I’d do some more reading outside, or I’d nap in my lilac room, or I’d oscillate between the two. I felt more grown up being alone all day, though eventually I found myself wishing for a little noise, for familiar voices to echo through these chambers in the excellent way I knew was possible. The kitchen could foster solitary reflection and could house tangles of chatty spirits; it needed both to be optimally full. And it was nice to behold this comfort in times that were equally trying and exciting – the house came to know a family unit that was different from exactly how it was at its onset. The room could adapt to the spiritual changes us humans could assault on its fixed form. After a certain Christmas we were all skewed somehow, but from then on we were allowed the space to evolve. We could climb the steps from the garage and be saddened by the disparate narratives of history and present day, and we could peer blinded with optimism into the corners of infinity that had not yet been explored. It was a dwelling that took notes while we sobbed or laughed or got lost in fatal thought. It didn’t judge us outright, though it could have. And maybe this perception is mine only, with my benefit of choice to depart my home for transprovincial schooling, with my ceaseless hope for family that remained good. Maybe my lonely dad, my abandoned sister, my fleeting mom, each felt differently. But this room was still pure to me in the mix of torment. I didn’t have to endure half-full dinners or emptied cabinets; I got to see what I wanted because I held singular belief in the possibilities at a home that was never not there for me. It was around when I was there. We gave to each other for decades. I offered crossword answers and droplets of coffee. I partook in gatherings of all sizes. I might have wished for an invariable family climate but I didn’t determine my love on this basis. The kitchen was always hospitable, always inviting. I was beholden to it but it was in some part mine, too, and so I provided how I could. I hope this was enough, though I’m still not sure exactly who’s doing the counting.
My very last night in that house, we threw a small party. A few of my sister’s friends came to drink wine over the cheese board she and I had put together. The neighbours that still lingered, not yet divorced or moved away, came to imbibe and ask how we were feeling. My mom even turned up to say goodbye, and I got to watch her scurry around her old kitchen with deft familiarity in between fragile chats with bygone friends. My dad was outwardly heartbroken by the sale of the house and kept repeating what was clear: that this was the last good party of ours this kitchen would host. He lingered at the stove where he’d many times hit his head on the hood, at the sink where he’d done the washing up in blistering water every night for twenty years, at his titular seat at the table where he’d dined with family, with friends, sometimes alone. But for all the heavy-handed pours of drink my dad had put on offer and for all the distress of the last few months, I didn’t seem to sink into expected sadness. I don’t know if I should call it levity, nor do I believe it was ignorance of a reality that would grow all the more true in time. It’s true that I’d never be able to return to the same house, to idle in morning light over coffee, to test out recipes on the palates of the loving people in this setting. No longer liable to leave spills on the pricey tile flooring over which my mom exasperatedly fussed. Expired hours of restlessness, of conversation, of pleasant musing. This was the closing parenthesis on the infinite equation, and all that was left unexplored here would remain pristine. But the through line of home was continuing; I could feel it. Like 51° sunshine clearing ambient snow, the house was radiating a certainty that replied in white reflection to the moon. This back-and-forth, this glimmering ember in the settling quiet, enunciated at last the few phonemes I could truly parse. I felt the kitchen’s scripture sink into my ever-aging skin, transcribed its tracings in my ledger of family meaning. This was no photo album, implacable and tangible; this was every force that kept blood flowing in circuitous rhythm. We had needed the space to breath and we would not be without, wherever we went next, whatever other parcel of universe awaited our humble arrival. Little atoms of the kitchen were everywhere: knit into the suitcase half-packed up in my room and lifted from dust on the last of the wine bottles retrieved. It would come with us and effloresce in abstruse dining rooms, grease the hinges of new cupboards, amble between us with familial polarity on all future occasions of celebration. My soft-hearted dad, my particular mom, my amiable sister, and me. And the kitchen, a fifth family member, looking sweetly to the rest of time before it.
Who knows if I said a proper thank you to Patricia, or to my parents for their allotment of time and funds for the renovation. Maybe the aesthetic never mattered and my earliest conviction – that our unembellished home bolstered family – was in its own puerile way most true. Impossible to say, but thank you anyway, thank you for bestowing upon us this endlessness.
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