Let’s talk about kitchen design. I’ll start with mine. Not to go into too many details, but I’ll just say that if all the people who have been to my house—and countless others if they saw photos—voted for the most glorious kitchen, I’m confident that mine would come in dead last.
The designer Hillary Farr, of HGTV’s “Love It or List It,” would have an apoplectic fit. Zillow wouldn’t know what to make of it. Architectural Digest would feature it only if they put out a parody issue. And yet, I love it.
The house was built in 1931. Certainly there have been tweaks, improvements and code upgrades, but the kitchen, with the exception of dead appliance replacements, is as it always was. Herbert Hoover in full bloom.
Part of it is a galley and part of it is not. I guess you’d call it L-shaped were it not for the nook that used to house the telephone, making it more lightning bolt with 90-degree angles. Whatever it is, it is not today’s ever-so-popular open concept. When I entertain, I don’t want help and I don’t want to be on display. I want my guests to mingle, elsewhere, and I want to hear them talking and laughing over hors d’oeuvres and drinks. If they’re laughing about or at me, I don’t care so long as they’re having a good time.
The house I grew up in was built in 1906 and had a kitchen even more primitive. While my parents had graduated to a bona fide Frigidaire, it was still called the icebox. I thought people who used the word “refrigerator” were snooty.
Do you ever watch “House Hunters,” another of HGTV’s offerings? I used to watch it the way I used to dive into a big bag of Doritos: delicious at first, then followed by disgust.
“House Hunters” makes me sad, not so much because of the cookie-cutter, sterile designs; rather, due to the buyers. And the younger they are, the sadder I feel. So often they’re 20-somethings, neonates in the work-world, tying themselves down to a plot of land and a mortgage way too young, unaware that the job, so welcome in the beginning, will devolve to Stalinesque torture, but they’ll be trapped. And their demands guarantee they’ll never be out of debt: granite countertops, stainless appliances, an island the size of Rhode Island, more storage than a Williams-Sonoma warehouse—the list goes on. When I was in my twenties looking for an apartment, my “must-haves” were running water, a front door that locked, rent I could pay out of pocket, and a lease with an out-clause that didn’t include my firstborn.
Your twenties are for being carefree, grateful for others’ cast-offs knowing you can later abandon and cast off those items to traipse through unknown lands and have adventures. As an old friend said, it’s last call for being wild and silly. The house, the trappings can wait.
The Greek poet Constantine Cavafy, wrote a marvelous poem, “Ithaka,” about Odysseus’s sailing home from the Trojan War. The trip took Odysseus 10 years and is a metaphor for arriving at one’s goal. I discovered this poem while in college and the first sentence gripped me then and has guided my life since: “When you set out for Ithaka ask that your way be long, full of adventure, full of instruction.”
The goal is to have a meaningful life.
I’m no longer in my twenties. The furnishings and fripperies of those days are long gone, but the memories of travel, risks taken and people I’ve met remain fresh and comfort me more than any high-end stove could.
And now, I’ll go down to my weird kitchen for another cup of coffee. And I’ll enjoy it. Immeasurably.
– Dorothy
