Revelations from My Least Loved Room

Food isn't the only thing my orange kitchen cooks up

I lost myself for two whole days this week, a couple of partial ones too.

I am moving to Europe for a year of writing and my home will be rented while I’m away. I’ve made radical moves before but this packing up is the hardest I’ve ever done. The stuff isn’t the only stuff that needs to be dealt with.

We moved to this clapboard, single-family in a slightly ratty neighborhood seven years ago. The house served us well through the kids’ middle school years, then high school and Covid. Now they’ve flown the coop and I’m left with the debris.

It feels like being alone in a theater after the show is over and the lights are turned up bright. I have one month left to set the stage for some other family’s story.

I find myself moving through the house the way I do with the personal essays I write; inspecting each element and trying to judge its worth from the perspective of a renter as I would for a reader.

Simplify, simplify. What is essential? Does this hefty piece deserve the space it takes up? This decorative frill, does it add value or is it clutter I should clear away?

The Spiral of Curation

My mission is ‘chuck, leave, or store’ and I’m ready to be ruthless. My plan begins with the kids’ bedrooms where it’s surprisingly easy to box up what they might want to see again and then stow it away in the attic. My room goes even faster.

I begin to slow down as I reach the common living areas. The renters might enjoy my impressive Christmas cactus—but if it dies, will they remember to save the pot?

I picture the cactus getting knocked over and lying ruined and broken on the floor. My son, Mac painted the pot at school and brought it home for a long ago Mother’s Day. The divorce was still bloody, and it shouldn’t have been my weekend with the kids, but their dad had conceded the swap. A small, much-needed win for all of us.

I don’t need another project but shouldn’t I just re-pot the cactus?

I move on to the living room and the huge sheepskin rug that my ex-husband and I bought in New Zealand a quarter century ago. We were traveling the world and shyly beginning to think of setting up home together.

Our children played and drifted off to sleep in the softness of that sheepskin, and Gingey, our old tiger-cat too. But all that precious fluff won’t store well, rolled up and sharing the attic with visiting mice. Can I entrust it to someone else, allow them to add a layer of their memories?

Memories. That’s what it all comes down to, the stories woven into the artifacts of our lives. Everything I touch resonates with some kind of energetic echo, something more alive than its history, and I find myself searching for the source.

I am surprised when the kitchen is where I finally find it.

The Orange Outburst

The kitchen is orange because I came home from work on a gloomy winter’s day and just couldn’t stand feeling the same way inside my house as I did standing outside.

The house is old, 1860, and the kitchen is a cold and drafty mid-century add-on. So I decided to paint it orange, got back in my car, and went to buy paint.

I was a professional chef for many years and I’ve cooked in all sorts of awkward corners and firey hellholes.

I even cooked on a sailboat with a gimbaled stovetop that was level with my chin when we sailed close to the wind in one direction, and then dropped to my knees when we changed tack. I alternated between being unable to stir the pots and being careful not to topple into them. At least it was fun.

The orange feels very 1970s, which is appropriate because I think that’s when the linoleum flooring was installed. I'm not sentimental about kitchens, but this one sucks.

Making Space

The house’s previous owner was fond of knocking down walls and the kitchen has few cupboards. When I ripped out the dishwasher to put the space to better use, there was an unexpected side benefit—after-dinner clean-up became a team effort.

As dishes were washed and dried and put away, conversations from the dinner table changed flavor and became more spontaneous. Something about all of us working together made the kitchen a place where new ideas could be voiced, where secrets could be shared.

The orange kitchen is where my kid came out, first as gay then later as trans. We talked for hours about gender and what it means in every context we could think of. I learned words like cis and heteronormative. I heard about brave spaces where kids like my kid were sharing stories so I could learn still more.

Soul Food

The heavy clouds that had grayed my child’s spirit for years began to drift away. One day, my shining child cut short our conversation to go tackle a homework assignment saying, “It’s hard to write poetry when you’re not depressed”. And, just like that, I could breathe again. We were going to be okay.

When Covid arrived, our little family was well suited to the bubble life it brought. The kitchen was our meeting place when work and the boredom of online schooling got to be too much. There were coffee experiments (mine), imaginative snack creations (everyone’s), and some disgusting-looking smoothies designed exclusively by Mac.

Then the world opened up again and the boys were young adults, ready to emerge. Scout bought clippers and the kitchen became a part-time barber shop. Not the most hygienic arrangement but the orange kitchen had proved itself as a kind of social laboratory, well-suited to rites of passage and I didn’t complain.

Constructing, Clipping, ... and Cooking!

The Gladness of Orange

The kids have been gone for a couple of years now. First, they got licenses, then cars and plans of their own. They boarded airplanes and are flying high on the adventures of their lives. My heart bursts with emotion for them—excitement, trepidation, admiration—the whole rainbow of parental love.

A while back, I realized that framed photos had become touchstones of longing that turned my children into ghosts of the past. The pictures showed their cuteness but not the vibrance of who they are now. It was easy to pack them away.

I expected packing up the kitchen to be easy too—a room of hard surfaces dedicated to functionality, no handpainted cactus pots to deal with. Yet the space is filled with something else, a presence of sorts. As if the layers of time spent all around the house have chosen to gather here.

The presence isn’t attached to anything physical, anymore than the essence of my kids is linked to a photo. It’s more real than that.

If I could pack one thing to remind me of this home, it would be the feeling that lives in the orange kitchen.

Grace for the Absence

Poetry is a place I go when I need words for spaces that can’t be seen, words that evoke the shape of quiet feelings. As I circle through the rooms of my unhomed house, this short poem often accompanies me.

I unpetalled you, like a rose,
to see your soul,
and I didn't see it.
But everything around
-horizons of land and of seas-,
everything, out to the infinite,
was filled with a fragrance,
enormous and alive.

―Juan Ramón Jiménez

Thanks for reading. Please forward this to someone you think might enjoy it if you feel so inclined.

Warmly,
Beth

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