My Grandmother's Kitchen

 

Thickly painted robin's egg blue cupboards framed the window looking down to the river, a trivial and unimportant view as any farmer's wife preferred to see what was happening at the barn.  And so it was, that the focal point of my grandmother's kitchen was not the window, the cupboards, nor the behemoth, blackened wood burning stove which produced warmth, wonderful scents and greasy gray streaks of soot on the canary yellow walls. No, the focal point of my grandmother's bright kitchen was the overstuffed, threadbare chair wedged in the corner beside that stove, for it was here she let my brother and me comb her hair, told us stories, and, upon begging, taught us bad words in Pennsylvania Dutch: dommy and dumkoff. I’d been hoping for damn or darn, maybe even shit, but none were in this sweet woman’s lexicon in any language.  She inherited the kitchen when she married into the family in 1931. The colours were well established long before then, before I, or my father, entered the picture.  Sadly, my grandmother passed away more than 30 years ago, the wood burning stove was pulled out to make way for a modern one about 20 years ago, and that old chair – already two steps away from the scrap heap when I was a child – has long since disappeared.  But the bright blue and yellow colour scheme lasted right up until last month when my brother, whose children built their own memories of that kitchen, painted them a more muted palette of soft grey and green.