In order to get to my kitchen, there are 3 entrances, the back glass sliding door, the garage door, or the family room. Regardless of which entrance you use, you will see my kitchen table first. Standard light pine oval table with 6 chairs, two currently connected to booster seats for my youngest. That kitchen table is the first real purchase my husband and I made for our home. We lived in a small townhouse when we first got married. That townhouse was great, except for the lack of eating space. We had taken an old goodwill wobbly table, stuck it against a wall, and squeezed past it everyday to go into that small kitchen. When we finally bought our first real house, my husband swore he wasn't going to take that old table, so to the furniture warehouse we went. I thought the fold-in table leaf was the greatest thing since sliced bread, remembering family dinners as a child and trying to not hit the wall as I had to bring the big table leaf into the dining room. This table we bought came with 4 chairs, my husband said we needed 6, for visitors. Looking at my family at the dinner table each night, I'm surprised at how fast those 6 chairs filled up. Now we bring in folding chairs from the basement when we have visitors and our table leaf is always out.
In my kitchen the fruit bowl is on the counter. If that bowl goes empty I will make a trip to the grocery store that day, because there has to be fresh fruit in my kids school lunches everyday. Also in their lunches is a treat, so I turned a pretzel jar into our snack jar, where the kids can choose a treat to put in their lunch. It's great for portioning out those cookies into snack bags to slow down my temptation to eat all of them at once. If the jar goes empty I don't run to the store, but I'll let my kids pick a bag of chips from the basement if there are any there.
In the corner behind my sink are my plants. Some of them are dead, others are taking over the whole area. I have 3 African violets, they seem impossible to kill. When I'm doing the dishes and a drinking cup with water needs to be put in the dishwasher, I pour the water into the plants instead of down the sink. Once I noticed my violet pot seemed to be bobbing. I took the plastic pot out of the ceramic pot and saw a full cup of water. The violet did not drown. More often than not, the violet soil is dried out. They still don't die, and I get cute flowers 3-4 times a year. There is a terrific plant with striped leaves I really like, but don't know the name of. It has been growing and stretching out of it's small pot and through the other plants. The plant leaves looks great at it's tips, but for some reason the leaves closest to the soil don't look so good. I would have thought it would be the other way around. I'm not sure what to do with that plant, so it continues growing outside it's bounds and looking almost-dead near it's roots.
On my stove is a red teapot. My husband bought it for me after years of asking why we had a discolored stained one. My answer was 'because it was my mom's and it works'. Most husbands would leave it well enough alone as sentimentality for the dead, but my was more practical. He was right, this one looks much better, I like red more than faded flowers.
My fridge is covered with alphabet and word magnets. My floor usually has it's fair share of them, too. When I sweep I always pick up the letters, but sometimes not the words. They don't seem to be used very much, and it seems to take so much effort to find the other words needed to turn your feelings into verse on the fridge that throwing away one or two at a time don't seem like that big of a deal. But now I don't know if I would have the words necessary for my children to become poets in the kitchen.
When my kitchen is clean, I get a terrific urge to bake. Cookies, cake, rolls, maybe even a pie. A clean kitchen will do that to me. There's something about a wiped of stove, an empty sink and cleared off counters that seem to be calling out, "use me, use me, what can we create today?"
