home

Sometimes I think nothing is real outside my kitchen. I once opposed kitchens as the entrance room of a home, as a tiny disorganized catch-all with shoes piled against cabinets and purses on the counters. My kitchen is the first room of my apartment, and since my son's crib and belongings occupy the bedroom so that my life happens between kitchen and living area, my kitchen is half my home. When I sleep in the corner of the living room my bed is a dozen feet from the fridge, and the pipes and wires and electricals sing and hum sci-fi music lullabies. No wall separates, the only distinction is the end of linoleum and beginning of carpet.

My kitchen is half my home, and more, when bottles of brewing wine run out of space atop the fridge (competing with the radio, iron, and motorcycle helmets) and begin to colonize the shelves above the art desk (which is half the counter space in my kitchen and in fact built from discarded kitchen cabinets topped with an old door and shelves taken from an apartment after eviction before demolition), or when a bowl of fragrant rising bread is shuffled onto the upturned-bowl cushions of the papasan chair (fifteen bucks at a thrift store I AM NOT EVEN KIDDING) while we run lumpy green apples tiny and hard and bitter, fresh from the trees by the apartments, through an aged food processor that looks like a nineteen-fifties sausage grinder, into the bowl for the kitchenaid mixer because it's the biggest we have and we're making the beginnings of apple wine...

My kitchen is half my home, and more, when I'm painting on scavenged wood and cowboy coffee boils on the stove, and my son sits at my feet eating blackberries from the graveyard, and my boyfriend sits on my bed braiding a bullwhip (this week's obsession), and there's no place that food ends and life begins because we're all right in the middle of it.

I paused from flinging and folding shaggy rye dough to kneel at my son's seat and ask why the yelling. He reached for my hands to grab the peeling oil and flour, and said "BITE" and shoved a tiny chunk of juicy white pork chop into my mouth. I chewed wide-eyed and he laughed, babbled, sang to his dinner as I covered the dough to rise.

By ethics and not only architecture my life inhabits the kitchen. I choose to come home and begin the next day's bread, and wash dishes while my boyfriend cooks dinner and my son stands on a sturdy box beside me splashing and telling me about "WATER?" and "SPOON?" and "BUBBLE?" and says a quiet "bye-bye" to the sink when we're done. I read books about food - M.F.K Fisher, Julie Child, bread and Bombay, agriculture and gardening, homesteading and slaughtering goats, bees and tomatoes, chickens and zucchini. When I am outside it is to herd my son up the hill to the playground, and farther up to the graveyard, while I pick blackberries and he rambles close & observed. He brings me flowers and I name them, and the berries will be tomorrow's breakfast cobbler or a bottle of hopeful percolating wine.

What else would there be?