Saying Good-bye to My Kitchen

Tonight, I begin packing.  Maybe by making that proclamation, I will actually do it!  Brandon has begun, and I've dragged in a stack of boxes from the mountain of boxes I've been collecting, but I haven't actually put anything in a box.  We're beginning the move in three days.  Should I be nervous?  

Instead of doing something productive with the disaster that is my house, I'm feeling nostalgic for my spaces.  I've got beach camping gear sprinkled in every room, empty boxes poised for packing, loaded boxes ready to be moved, and dirty laundry toppling out of the hampers, but before I tackle the job ahead of me, I decided to go through all the pictures on my phone and see if I have any good ones of the inside of the house we've been living in for nearly thirteen years, before I begin to disassemble it.   Will Future Rain enjoy seeing my old refrigerator?  I think she will! Good-bye refrigerator.  I will miss the way I pile bowls on top of you so that I can't actually use the cabinets behind the stack of bowls.  

Have you ever visited someone's kitchen and admired their clutter free counter tops, beckoning like open work spaces just begging for culinary experimentation and giant trays of baked goods?  Well, that is not the condition of our kitchen counters!  

Jamie once counted over a dozen kitchen gadgets out on our counter, including two blenders, two giant juicers, and two crock pots.  

Good-bye crowded counter tops, I'll miss all the good times we had cooking together, but I'm sure my new, even more crowded, counter tops will fill the void.

I will not miss the hate cabinet.  I've hated the hate cabinet for so long, I can't imagine working in a kitchen without a little hate mixed in.  

Even looking at a picture of the inside of the hate cabinet makes me feel a little hate.  Oh, it's terrible.  It's a place piled with unbalanced and ill fitting objects where, like hateful magic, the thing I need is always behind a precariously stacked pile of plastic storage dishes (minus the lids, of course) and pots.  There are also weird pieces of kitchen gadgetry that jump out onto the floor no matter how carefully I try to sneak the thing I want out of there.  And of course, it's dark and down low, so that my back starts to ache while to wrestle with the contents and the hate starts to fill my mouth so that I can only relieve the pressure by spewing curse words.  I HATE this stupid cabinet!  So long, ass-hole!  

Now, this cabinet, I like.  So tidy, so easy to find my things.  I've always liked you, dish cabinet.  Good-bye.

But all my love goes to this cabinet.  It's packed full, so I have to approach with cation, but if I treat it gently, I find all the goodies. Chocolate bars, dried fruits, nuts, pastas, all the yummiest stuff stored right at eye level.  I will truly miss the goody cabinet, at least until I put all the goodies in a new home.  

The sink and I have become well acquainted over the years.  I have a feeling with my new sink, which has much more shallow bowls, I may occasionally miss the old sink.  

I've cooked many meals in this space, and even though it's narrow and crowded, it still the place where we find our selves hanging out and talking while we work.  It's been a comfortable place for us.  Good-bye, kitchen.