When we were planning our kitchen renovation, i wanted a place for cookbooks. No one uses them anymore I was told, you need a spot for your computer……

I considered this for a moment – no, i need an open shelf in the kitchen for some of my cookbooks. This week when the rhubarb was ripening I pulled out a french foods book with a butter crust recipe to be worth indulging all your fat intakes for the week! Inside two photos slipped out from the pages, one of my dad, my mom and my oldest daughter when she was two. We were camping at scotch creek, i was carrying daughter two.  My heart flutters and I see myself at 21 holding my first pentax 35 ml. 

The opposite photo was my Grandmother standing outside of her kitchen window which impacted the design choice for the windows in our house.  I was looking at these last year during rhubarb time, tucked them away and found them again in the flour dusted pages.

Strawberries aren’t quite ready here so these are from the market…. When my littlest daughter was two she would disappear from the kitchen and slip into the garden outside the old back porch. I would find her sitting in the soft warm spring ground with chubby hands picking strawberries and eating in the early morning sun. I rarely handle strawberries without feeling her softness as i brushed her off my garden girl, now my far and away girl.

Unpacking boxes I excitedly exclaimed, ‘oh here is my juicer’…..

apparently that isn’t the current image that comes to mind for the term. I have always been drawn to yesterdays methods and objects. There is something that provides comfort in old tea cups, tin colanders, hand mades, heart focused, homespun.

The kitchen is the center of most homes I have loved. It will be my favorite place in the revised house, old and new and stacked together.

Yesterday a dear friend visiting asked where is the clutter, I laugh and know it will sneak its way home in bits and pieces. We are a bit bare bones as we have just been starting to used the space on the newly renovated main floor. I believe today it will be revisited by painters and chaos, and the clutter is on its way no doubt, some built in against the design suggestions. ‘it is dated’. 😉

In the little reading nook upstairs another few shelves house cook and gardening books, this one is built in to the island. The bright spines invite me to leaf through with a cup of coffee and consider trying something different, although most of the time i look for old familiars. My moms tattered red covered blue ribbon flour cook book vanished in her last move. We were all so sorry to have lost its favored recipes but most sorry to have lost the notes in her hand writing beside each tried and tested success.

I love the pages in books. Turning ones in my house often leads to found objects. Photos, notes, pressed flowers and leaves and with them a door opens to a memory. Perhaps dated, but then again so am I!

I think where ever you go in this life, it is best to go as yourself.  If home doesn’t include that, it probably should. A house is the box we live in. Sometimes small and sometimes tattered, sometimes a bit more grand, but home, well that is the people that live inside the box and when you are clear about that, everything else is simply a detail.