Your Great Great Grandma’s Kitchen

For the past week I’ve been ingesting a novel so sweetly dripping with hearty and sincere prose that I have to share it with someone. I’m going to let you into my happy little world where I’ve been reverently eavesdropping on the fictional letters of a dying, 76-year-old Mid-western preacher to his young son.
Here is an excerpt from the Pulitzer-awarded Gilead (2004):

We came to this house when I was still a small boy. We had no electricity for years, just kerosene lamps. No radio. I was remembering how my mother used to love her kitchen. Of course it was very different then, with an icebox and a pump sink and a pie safe and a woodstove. That old table is about all that is the same, and the pantry. She had her rocker so close to the stove that she could open the oven door without getting up. She said it was to keep things from burning. She said we couldn’t afford the waste, which was true. She burned things often enough anyway, more often as the years passed, and we ate them anyway, so at least there wasn’t any waste. She loved the warmth of that stove, but it put her to sleep, especially if she’d been doing the wash or putting up preserves. Well, bless her heart, she had lumbago, and she had rheumatism, too, and she did take a a little whiskey for it. She never slept well during the nights. I suppose I got that from her. She’d wake up if the cat sneezed, she said, but then she’d sleep through the immolation of an entire Sunday dinner two feet away from her. That would be on a Saturday, because our family was pretty strict on Sabbath-keeping. So we’d know for an entire day beforehand what we had to look forward to, burned peas and scorched applesauce I remember particularly.

The Tramp At Christmas by Grandma Moses

If I were a time-traveling publisher, I would go back fifty years or so and implore Grandma Moses (1860-1961)to create illustrations for this work. A good deal of my childhood, and beyond, was spent hypothetically living inside her portraits of turn-of-the-century Americana. In my fanciful yet simple imaginary life, there were maple trees to sugar, cows to milk, barn dances to attend. In the wintertime I tucked my hands inside a fur muff, sledded, and rode in horse-drawn carriages with the other children. It was a far cry from my real world, growing up in coastal California where we didn’t know seasons and had to travel hundreds of miles just to have a snowball fight.

January by Grandma Moses

One of my first pieces of business when I arrive in the next world is to thank my favorite aunt for giving me an oversized Grandma Moses Storybook when I was about eight. It had stories and poems such as Robert Frost’s The Road Not Taken, paired with Moses’ unrefined landscapes and rudimentary figures of farmers and townspeople.

Moses didn't begin painting until she was 76, after her husband died, and she created many pieces well into her nineties. Before she died at 101 she said "If I didn't start painting, I would have raised chickens. I could still do it now. I would never sit back in a rocking chair, waiting for someone to help me."

Gilead is a story of fathers and sons and the strength of family bonds which transcend passionate disagreements over war and religion. It’s about the power and limitations of relationships and the wonder and incomprehensibility of beauty. It is practical and joyful, like a Grandma Moses painting.

All Is Still by Grandma Moses

This morning I have been trying to think about heaven, but without much success. I don’t know why I should expect to have any idea of heaven. I could never have imagined this world if I hadn’t spent almost eight decades walking around in it.  -Gilead

A Country Wedding by Grandma Moses

She began to come to the house when some of the other women did, to take the curtains away to wash, to defrost the icebox. And then she started coming by herself to tend the gardens. She made them very fine and prosperous. And one evening when I saw her there, out by the wonderful roses, I said, 'How can I repay you for all this?' And she said, 'You ought to marry me.' And I did. -Gilead

 

 
Hoosick Falls In Winter by Grandma Moses

To play catch of an evening, to smell the river, to hear the train pass… -Gilead

It's a Smaller World After All

I have two reflections on this last day of the year.

First, as I look back on 2009 I'm struck that it's a smaller world after all.

It's a smaller world when I can include folks from every reach of the globe in my daily, real-time Twitter-sphere. It's a smaller world when elementary school chums and co-workers from decades ago re-emerge and re-enter my life via Facebook.

It's a smaller world when we share the same entertainment (think Susan Boyle on YouTube) and family highlight reels (such as the dance-down-the-aisle wedding procession that sent smiles virally and even influenced an episode of The Office) with strangers and folks from faraway lands.

Second, as we close a decade, I'm asking myself how I would have approached it had I known at the outset what it would hold. I might have been immobilized with fear. Time Magazine dubbed it the "Worst Decade Ever". What if I knew about September 11th, Hurricane Katrina or the economic crash? What if I knew my young cousin would lose his leg in Iraq or that I would lose my job and lose my mom?

Retrospection makes me feel strangely comforted. I certainly don't feel like this was the worst decade of my life. In fact, I wouldn't have missed it for anything and what I remember most are its victories: my co-patriots mobilizing to help each other in times of great need. And its lessons: I've learned to serve my community, invest in deeper friendships, take personal risks, love my family better and savor small blessings.

This perspective makes me trust and lean into God's divine strategy to give me just enough light to see my way clear for this day and just enough grace for each moment. It really doesn't matter what the next decade has in store. I have everything I need for today.

In 2006 Sisters Community Church hosted a "Firefighter Appreciation Night"

to thank those who battled the Black Crater Fire, which burned thousands of acres and forced hundreds of residents to evacuate.

Our heroes, just off the front lines and covered in ash, were presented with hundreds of pies and new socks. Some cried.

Dad’s Dream: A Tale of Two Houses

Thanks so much to St. Petersburg, Florida Kitchen Designer, Paul Anater, for inviting me to guest post for his blog Kitchen and Residential Design during his absence. The piece I’ve written is far more sentimental and estrogen-infused than his normal fare, so I’ve been second guessing the whole idea. I suppose I could have written about my specialty, Kitchen Design. But since my dad passed away thirty years ago this month I have been spending a lot of time revisiting some old memories, especially those surrounding our living spaces. So here I go, with a little Christmas tribute to my dad:



My dad, the electronics professor with the teasing wit and clip-on bow tie, had a manuscript for a college textbook to complete and three noisy rug rats underfoot.  “We’ll go to the country for the summer,” he must have said to Mom. So they rented a seven-bedroom, turn of the century, Dutch Colonial farmhouse in a small town nestled on the upland slope of the Santa Cruz Mountains. It was 1969.

 
The house itself was decrepit, with advanced plumbing issues. I can remember turning a squeaky faucet handle and observing the slow oozing of rusty goo into a wall-mount lavatory. It was minimally furnished, most notably for me with a record player and stack of albums which included The Ventures, Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass and The Beach Boys. There were clawfoot tubs, cold linoleum floors and secret passageways. It was absolutely wonderful; and it was here that we all huddled around our black-and-white console TV to watch a grainy image of Neil Armstrong’s walk on the moon.


While we kids were enamored with the house and the space to run, Dad was enamored with the close proximity of his beloved redwoods. These are graceful, velvet-barked, tilt-your-head-back-and-try-to-find-the-top kinds of trees. On many Sundays after church we would be treated to dipped cones at Foster Freeze, then a drive through the dense, moist, redwood forests of California’s Coastal Range.

Summer rolled into fall and it became clear that we weren’t ever going back to Monterey. Dad bought several acres of future paradise on a steep hillside with a lush valley view and never finished the manuscript.

For the next five years he was a man with a plan and a long commute to teach year-round plus some night classes. Our occasional vacations meant piling into the Ambassador station wagon (without seatbelts) to visit family, with stops to tour model homes: A-Framed, chalet-style mountain retreats. Dad’s enthusiasm was contagious, and we had all caught it.

So when the framing eventually went up, we were totally engaged with the process. I think this is why even today I adore the sweet scent of sawdust on a jobsite or in a cabinet shop. Miraculously my sister and I, as teenagers, were able to agree on one thing: our new bedroom would have lavender walls and chartreuse shag carpet. Deep shag. Life held such promise; we each had ample closet space for our bell bottoms and wrap-around skirts and plenty of wall space for our fuzzy black-light posters. Dad fashioned swinging saloon-style doors to separate the toilet space from our long, double vanity.

Dad's Dream House

All of the cabinetry was birch plywood with a simple, flat door, routed on the back side to lip over the face frame. Outfitted with the latest Harvest Gold appliances, the galley kitchen stretched no more than ten feet long. Mom chose sunflower gold tile for the countertops and a happy blue and yellow vinyl flooring. There was no microwave of course. We didn’t know we needed microwaves in the 70’s.

Brew-ha-ha
There was, however, a small appliance that truly christened the kitchen of our A-framed chalet in the redwoods. On our first Christmas in the new house, Auntie Midgie and Uncle Owen presented my parents with the latest innovation: a Joe DiMaggio-endorsed, Mr. Coffee automatic drip coffeemaker that eventually gurgled and brewed to everyone’s delight. But Dad “wrote the book” on electronics, so he didn’t need directions. When his first coffee-brewing efforts were met without success, Dad proclaimed in his most professorial voice that there was obviously “too much turbulence in the scupper hole." This would become a family mantra of sorts for all future technical difficulties.

Uncle Owen admires the Mr. Coffee.  (Mom & Dad are on the right)

And so just as Dad had dreamed, this A-Framed abode with its pointed nose of window glass, extensive redwood decking and mountain charm, sat in harmony with its environs. And a gregarious, hard-working man realized a dream.

Less than two years later, before the new-house smell had even gone, Dad learned that he had lung cancer. Our family went into survival mode and tried to reconcile that what once felt like a shiny new beginning was now the beginning of the end. My courageous dad tried to go back to work for awhile with just one lung. He loved a few things even more than the redwoods...teaching for one, family for another.

Just before Dad passed, he briefly came out of a semi-comatose state and with a sense of urgency asked us to sing a hymn, In The Garden. My mom, Auntie Midgie and I sang it very poorly, but Dad's eyes and ears seemed to be witnessing something infinitely more angelic. Here is the last verse:

I'd stay in the garden with Him,
Though the night around me be falling,
But He bids me go, through the voice of woe,
His voice to me is calling.
And He walks with me, and He talks with me,
And He tells me I am His own,
And the joy we share as we tarry there,
None other has ever known.

He left us, there in his redwood paradise. He had pursued the things he loved. As I squeamishly approach the age my dad was when he bought that piece of property(!), I appreciate ever more deeply the lifestyle he modeled. He is still teaching. He’s teaching us to journey to discover our own unique dreams, the ones that are so divinely designed that they inspire a hope that propels us to act, and a joy that’s contagious.

Eleanor Roosevelt said, “Today is a gift; that’s why they call it the present.”

Merry Christmas.