Monday, February 11, 2008

house: a (tiny) memoir
When he remodeled the kitchen, removing wood stove and adding new cupboards, he turned large kitchen into smaller with office and laundry room, a space to leave boots. I remember it as the time that my mother would let me eat cereal in the living room, so I could watch my cartoons uninterrupted. This was 1974, and my mother and I on a Saturday morning watching cartoons as my father and hired man tore through the kitchen, and I tore through my multiple bowls of Count Chocula.

She would let me do that, or Boo Berry or Trix, but drew the line always at Cap’n Crunch; just what was the difference? The cereal I could only get at her own mother’s house, up in Ottawa.

I always wanted the toys in the box, but she never let me order away, and didn’t always pay attention to just what I was missing (the pan-flute, individual flutes in the boxes you could line up in a row; I had only the longest one, yellow, and shortest one, red. How can you make any song up with those?). I had to wait for my twenties to order away, when I could write my own cheques.

The kitchen, when I was still two years away from a sister. At that point, she wasn’t even a glint.

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