Slow Goodbyes: The Kitchen

One of our friends texted with me for a bit yesterday and said he imagined saying goodbye to our present home will be an emotional journey for me. I have no idea why he would ever think anything related to me could be categorized as emotional. {If you're new here, please insert sarcasm here and pass me a box of Kleenex.}

He knows, as do many of you, that this home where we began married life holds sentiment far beyond the fact that this is where we began married life. This was where I began adulthood. This was my first home purchase. And this was my grandparents' home for most of their married life. So yes, I do imagine there is a bit of a grieving process involved, and I don't fully expect it to hit me until it's all over and I come back for what I know is the last time.

But since I do about 50% of my emotional dumping through words, I thought throughout these next few days, I would take advantage of your extreme kindness and say goodbye to our house here, in this place. We're not done here, but this seems as good a time as any to say goodbye, room by room, and pay a well-deserved tribute to this place we called home.

And of course, we start with the kitchen, because...why wouldn't we?

The kitchen is nearly packed. The only things left on shelves and in cabinets are actual food and whatever items are needed on a daily basis to cook and eat said food. All duplicates are packed. All superfluous items are packed. All decorations are packed. And the room looks shockingly like the last scene of Friends, when the camera pans the empty apartment and the cast walks out for their final coffee shop run.

This kitchen was the first room we overhauled after we got married. The room where we spent our entire first Memorial Day weekend, hauling cabinets and appliances into other rooms, painting the walls a color I still love so dearly, refinishing the countertops, and laying new flooring. {That last part was done entirely by Ryan and Adam. I just took pictures.} This was the room in which we learned to work as a team in a brand new way and where we decided we wanted to be Carl and Ellie {from Up}.

Our kitchen isn't huge, and some find it awkward, even, but it has served us so well over the last three years we've been married. And it served me well for twelve years before that. You learn to move in rhythm in this room - almost a dance of moving back and forth, side to side, sometimes colliding and then finding the rhythm again.

It's a simple room that used to be decked out in coffee love. There used to be an espresso machine sitting atop that cabinet there, and our little white curlicue "S" in the corner. Our mug tree was by the coffee pot, and the night light sat on a shelf. And now it's pretty bare.

Now we've just got the necessities left: the coffee pot and enough light to pour by in the late night and early morning hours.

That corner used to hold a TV, and I watched hours of sitcom reruns while moving back and forth over the old carpet we ripped up, baking and learning to cook.

The microwave was a gift from my sisters when I graduated from college: my first grown up appliance. Our new house has a built in microwave, so we leave this one behind. It warmed up thousands of coffee cups and popped a lot of movie-watching popcorn for us, and we trust it to care for its new {and yet-to-be-determined} owners well.

This picture shows the tug of war between living and packing. The mixer left out to shred our chicken and whip up desserts between now and moving day. The empty granola canister awaits the baking of a fresh batch. The towel has been relocated to the counter because I packed the bar that once served as its home. The bread sits out after I packed its sleek hiding box.

The push and pull of living in a space that needs to function and needs to be packed.

The sink where my grandma peeled potatoes for Easter, Thanksgiving, and all the other family gatherings. Where she used to hook up the hoses to the dishwasher after she pulled it across the floor from its hiding place in the corner. {It's been updated to a permanent appliance now, thank goodness!}The garbage disposal that Ryan installed for me back when we first started dating, and he wanted me to know that he would take care of me, no matter what. {So he started with researching, purchasing, and replacing my disposal - all as a gift.}

The cooking space - small though it may be - where I turned out hundreds of cookies and chopped not quite that many vegetables. The stove where I learned to cook, including the disasters of the "burnies" and the undercooked chicken thighs. It actually was the OLD stove where I learned to cook - the one with the huge chip out of the white porcelain where I dropped a hot dish on the surface. The one with the white stain on the burner where Grandma let a tea kettle boil dry on the hot coil. The stove that Ryan declared we could not move back into our brand new kitchen after our Carl and Ellie weekend. So he surprised me with this beautiful new treasure with its flat top and working oven light.

This is the room where Grandma provided for her family. Where my aunt and mom learned to cook. Where every holiday meal originated for my entire childhood. It's where I learned to cook and to make meals come together in proper time and order. Where I cooked the first meal I ever made for Ryan. Where we cooked together for the first time and for a hundred times since.

It's small, but it sure does have a host of memories crammed between the walls.

Our new kitchen is a little bigger. It has a pantry, which I'm so excited about. It has a microwave over the stove that won't require tip-toeing food in and out. It has a refrigerator with water and ice in the door which is something I've never had in my entire natural-born life. And when Ryan gets done with his demo day, it will have a straight shot view into the living area, which is something neither of us has ever enjoyed in either of our homes.

The new kitchen will hold more memories for us, more family dinners, more cups of coffee. It will hold more of the same and more of the unknown.

Our first purchase for that new kitchen is the perfect little table to put inside where we can share those cups of coffee and conversations about everything imaginable.

But this little kitchen - the one too small to hold a table - will always be precious to us. It's been carefully taken apart, lovingly packed up, and we're ready to reconstruct it in similar ways in a new space. But the memories made in this house, in this kitchen, have been carefully recorded, lovingly documented and will never be taken away.