Monday 12 Sept 2005
1:58 p.m.

In a small kitchen, organization and tidiness are essential. They are not always in effect at my house, but when they are, the kitchen is a delightful room. Now that it’s painted, one doesn’t feel as if entering a dark cave when it’s time to make supper or wash the breakfast dishes. It’s become a pleasant place to cook, eat, and clean. There is more light.

When I slide dishes into their tight spaces, for instance into the plastics drawer that I have partitioned using a discarded shoebox, I think of my mother’s and grandmother’s kitchens. We are the only ones in our homes (well I guess Dad now) who know where every food-storage or prep item is, down to the tiniest twist-tie. I suppose this is true of most people who spend at least an hour a day in their kitchens. (Not that Grandma does any more, but she used to. Now it’s Meals-on-Wheels for her three times a week, and M-o-W’s leftovers the other days.)

Scott is only slightly exaggerating when he jokes that although he lives here too, he is never sure where anything is, because I am always reorganizing and finding new places for the sugar bowl (even I am not always sure where this is, because it is so rarely used), the corkscrew, the coffee. Improve, improve, improve! Or in my case ... where the hell am I going to squeeze in this new pizza board?

Grandma washes and dries bread bags and tightly wraps them, one after the other, around an empty paper-towel roll. You can pull off one bag at a time; very handy. She has a tiny kitchen too, and everything fits into everything else like those Russian dolls, or lines up in a neat row. Every cupboard space is filled. I’ve been using her kitchen for so many years, I know it as well as my own. Nothing but the paint has changed for as long as I remember. Well, why try to improve on perfection? Grandma is a pro.

Mom had nice big kitchens with tons of cupboards and counters and storage in their most recent four or five homes. Space wasn’t an issue, but she was picky about where everything went. The last time they moved, from Salmon Arm to Kelowna, it was me who unpacked the carefully marked boxes and put away the kitchen utensils, the teapots, the Tupperware, the pans. I assumed Mom would reorganize after I was gone and she had some time, but she told me last year that I had chosen just the right place for it all, that she hadn’t had to relocate a thing. We must have had similar kitchen sensibilities.

It pleases me to think that, and to know that I have her hands, her voice, her love of fabric and music, and some of her always-a-bright-side attitude which, until she was dying and her friends started naming her most appreciated qualities, I myself had not consciously noticed. There are even a few who insist I look like Mom, which is hard to believe after being told all my life that I am the spittin’ image of Dad. But some see otherwise.

Nowadays, as I go about my tasks in the kitchen, tucking an apron in here, a wooden spoon in there, I imagine that some of my skill at creating order comes from my mother and her mother, and that Mom can peek in and approve my daily efforts more now than she could before.