What I have to say to all of you on the East Coast
This is a picture of my kitchen in the 1950s:
And here it is again this morning:
I cannot physically restrain myself from lining up my fruits and veggies. Don’t tease.
Our house is a midcentury California two-bedroom, not one of the magnificent Victorian pirate ship mansions in Alameda, not a Berkeley three-story with secret second staircases or closets with windows and false ceilings. This is the west coast; those things do not grown on trees around here. For smug east-coasters who post their Sierra Club membership stickers on 150-year-old glass windows and park their jeeps in ancient sheep barns, I resent you a bit. Remind me to post about barbequing fresh garden eggplants and bell peppers in November.
Here’s the kitchen, practically the day we got the keys:
East coast nonwithstanding, there’s a good lesson to be learned for those of us who read entirely too much Jane Austin at an impressionable age: we found layers and layers of wallpaper and beautiful old-growth redwood under exterior vinyl siding.
Further proof, we could suppose, that handsome strangers ride BART all the time without their hunting dogs. My virtue or the lack of it is rarely betrayed by area songbirds. People have lived here and left traces of themselves everywhere. Someday I might even tell you what I found in the garage of the empty house up the hill.
I do not need your sheep barns, Maine and Virginia, to not feel alone in my kitchen. Which, actually, is very wonderful to realize.
And look, chickens after all:
I also line up my vegetables, but only the ones I grow. I am unashamed. Now it is one more, of the many, reasons I love thee.
The house looks so incredible