Day 6 Gabriella, A Blue Kitchen

The first house that I owned outright in my name was a 1908 three story stucco and wood structure that resembled nothing more than a Spanish galleon about set sail down 12^th avenue. I had no credit to back me up when I was searching for a home so when the owner, John, a gentle German man in his 70’s with a sharp sense of financial prowess, offered to take my mortage privately for the going 12% I jumped at the chance.

I now was the proud and nervous landlord of a massive structure tilting down the busy street where car accidents happened on a regular basis. My daughter and I were about to own our very own abode. The digging began.

I decided that her room and my office would be carved out in the basement. It was full. John and his wife were ‘collectors’ of old medical equipment and beauty products. The big guys came, the dumpster sat in the back alley, a metal mouth hungry for cast offs from the previous 50 years. Rusty canes, boxes of plastic bottles of hair dye, seized up kidney machines and then a spot of turquoise, grimy and scratched poked up beneath the pile of garbage.

Two medical cabinets from the 30’s or 40’s with glass fronts and quaint script, Antiseptic and Sterilizer, captured my imagination. The Robins egg blue was worn and dirty and one glass pane was cracked but that only cemented my kinship with the history that was embedded in these drawers.

I imagined war, shattered limbs, shrapnel and nurses with perspiring brows salvaging ribbons of guaze in desperate times. In reality they were more likely to be from a hospital here in the city, but the stories were still blood soaked and wrenching in my imagination.

When I moved to a smaller house I packed the cabinets because I knew that one day they would be on display. The pair of medical relics lived in my attic for 23 years, carefully covered and almost forgotten as I wished and dreamed of a new kitchen for almost a quarter of a century. Finally a few years ago I put my foot down and gritted my money belt and the deconstruction began.

Walls tumbled, floors peeled up, sinks moved and my dreams began to bloom amidst a cloud of dust.

The cabinets pushed into my thoughts relentlessly, rectangular reminders of lives lived, wounds sutured and resilience.

I pushed the nagging voices from the attic away because how on earth could turquoise fit into this new pristine kitchen? It would never do. No, no, no…they would just have to bide their time patiently for another 25 years.

Then the hunt for cabinet colours began and the swatches of paper littered my table. I tried to keep my exuberant nature down to a modest purr but the lioness of kitch bared her lipsticked mouth and the swatch that kept rising above and beyond the squares of whites and greys was a beautify Robins egg blue. But this was impossible. A kitchen that screamed a tropical undersea in a Northern clime was so unseemly, but since when was I seemly?? We pulled down the cabinets from the attic and I felt a sigh of relief, from me or the cabinets or both I don’t know but they were home now.

Mounted on the wall, displaying wine glasses, a pink gravy boat and a spinning top from the 50’s we bring each other joy every day. This is home, from the first house that I dared to buy as a single mother with the odds stacked on my failure to the place I lay my head and feel contained. The healing aspect of their function is perfect.

The cabinets have travelled much longer than I and I can only surmise what stories they have seen but now we live together in a jumble of colour, grounded for the time being.