IN ONE MEMORY of my childhood kitchen, it’s dusk. My mother has lit brightly colored tapers on the battered round table, ladled heaps of pasta and pesto into mismatched bowls. My whole family is together, and my siblings and I report on the fabric of our days; Good thing, Bad thing, my parents call it, asking each of us for an accounting of our joys and sorrows. When I picture us, we’re laughing. In another memory, it’s morning, the rush before we’re off to school. My mother is nudging the dog repeatedly out of his preferred spot, directly in front of the exact cabinet she most often needs to access. My father turns the blender on to make a smoothie; my little brother asks a question over the whirring; my mother chides the dog: Buster, get up! There’s always too much noise, and never enough room.
On a bright winter Saturday, my father makes pancakes, the only thing he ever cooks. I learn to clamber up, unsteady, onto the counter to reach the bag of chocolate chips stashed in the back of the high cabinet. At Christmas, my mother makes a fussy corn soufflé just because it is my favorite. The kitchen I grew up in was a place of chaos, sweetness, and sustenance, mess and quotidian ease. Ask me to close my eyes and think of home, and it’s the room I see first. I know what a privilege this is, the fragrant, warm memory of a lucky childhood.
If you’re fortunate, the kitchen is like this: a place you’re fed. It can also be a place you find yourself achingly hungry—for food, or fellowship, or fulfilment—a locus of bounty, or of painful lack. Sometimes it’s a site of both things simultaneously. This is certainly the case for the novelist Rachel Yoder. In Yoder’s work, the kitchen is a porous and profoundly fertile environment. But it’s also a messy one, a site where the “tension between the domestic and the artistic is particularly acute,” where the need to nourish a child and the need to nourish oneself are often in ongoing feral conflict.
“I feel like the kitchen is the nexus of life,” she tells Lisa Ann Cockrel in their conversation for this winter issue of Image. However fraught and conflicted a space it is, it’s a site of endless fascination, and perpetual convergence. The kitchen is also a space that feels, to me, especially resonant as we enter the Advent season. It’s a space where devotion is made incarnate—in meals and copied recipes for chiffon cake, in steel sinks piled with dishes, and the work of washing them. And it’s where this devotion has both a foundation of joy and a real material cost. The kitchen reminds us to attune ourselves to the gift of all we have, and all that has been done for us, and to give back to others in return.
Throughout this issue, there are depictions of the kitchen in focus and as background, in technicolor and in grayscale. Often, it’s a clamorous place, as in the full and noisy house Iris recollects in Francis Spufford’s novel excerpt, “Chelsea Old Church,” a home dense, at the holidays, with the “waves of savory and sweet perfumes that rolled out of the kitchen.” At other moments, it’s quiet, or even empty, as in the kitchen of the defunct fraternity house in Gabriela Valencia’s essay, “Repurposed Building.” Wherever it crops up in these pages, you’ll find the kitchen is almost always a microcosm of something larger: a home, a life, a memory.
In Colin Page’s lush and joyful still lifes, the dining table is a territory of casual abundance: a moka pot, a half-full coffee cup, and an apple scattered among craft supplies. A bowl of blueberries beside a playing card, a china bowl, a ribbon, and some sticky notes. These paintings, he shares, “became more personal during 2020, when my family was homeschooling and the dining table was the primary shared space. The story of my family was spread out there every day.” In this sustained attention to the accumulation of a shared life, the ordinary becomes an object of wonder. A little raft of safety in a time of fear and precarity, the table itself becomes an archive of beauty.
In Seán Carlson’s “Easter Week in Valencia,” the poem’s first still lifes are “unpainted on the counter,” an array of fresh snacks for the speaker’s children:
…blood orange,
red pepper, ciruela, pepino, pear
from a morning market.
And, in offering up this food with the same devoted attention Carlson gives the “Passion / of Christ laid in brushstrokes,” the poem, too, reminds us that the divine exists inside the daily fabric of our lives. That we have an opportunity to be attuned to something holy not just when we pray, or raise our eyes to a depiction of a crucifix, but when we walk home with our children, “sit on the balcony, prepare our fruit.”
But the kitchen isn’t always this lovely, or this bountiful. In Lesley-Anne Evans’s “Low Blood Sugar,” a Weigh Down Workshop cautions her to reject physical hunger:
They taught me
to stave off those feelings—with a half glass of juice and a little prayer.
They said what I felt was
spiritual hunger, that I must learn to be fed
with spiritual food.
As a result, she loses thirty-six pounds, finds herself in a long litany of women who have starved “and made up for it / with visions of divine ecstasy.” If beauty dwells in the kitchen, so does expectation, and power. So do shame and anger. “Nourishment and brutality,” as Yoder reminds us, “often go hand in hand.”
The kitchens of my adult life have, of course, been more complicated than the safe, crowded kitchen of my childhood. Because of my neurological disorder, it takes me fifteen to thirty minutes just to chop a single onion, depending on the size. I have to wield the knife slowly and carefully, compensating for my poor coordination and ham-fisted grip, sometimes pausing to flex the pain out of my hand. I can’t multitask or make conversation if I’m cutting, or pouring, or working to transfer a hot pot off the stove. Most nights, I spill something, trying to navigate a kitchen that isn’t built for my wheelchair. Improbably, I really like to cook—this act of creativity, and care, and almost miraculous alchemy—but it’s complicated and labor intensive. I would love to tell you that I always remember to treat the slow, sustained work of it like a devotional: to feel lucky for the produce, bright in my refrigerator; grateful for my home and the gift of my body, its particular, irreplicable shape. But in truth, often I eat takeout, frozen vegetables, cereal from the box in exhausted handfuls. Often, I feel sorry for myself. Especially in the long stretches when I’ve lived alone, the kitchen has sometimes felt as much like a site of loneliness and suffering as a place of gratitude or joy.
Maybe this is why, among the things that move me most in this issue, are Margaret Ferrec’s ink and graphite drawings: the church kitchen, vacated and waiting; the small sink full of dirty dishes left to soak at night; the unremarkable view out the kitchen window—tree and fence and taillight, fragment of a neighbor’s house. In her sketches, I read tenderness, intimacy, and dedication, but also something freighted and anticipatory, maybe even a little bereft. In the kitchen, love and sorrow, exhaustion and hope coexist. I’m reminded that Advent itself is a time of waiting, of darkness that anticipates light, that doesn’t yet have the tangible assurance of the first rays over the horizon. Sometimes, in lieu of hymns, there’s just the low, constant hum of the refrigerator; sometimes the only glow is the sudden, strange fluorescence when you open its door.
But even the shine of refrigerator light is enough to let you see your way across a familiar room in the dark. And if the kitchen reminds of us of anything, it’s that a new day always follows the last one. And, in it, the sun will rise. And then someone will need to make breakfast: fry an egg, put the coffee on, wash and dry the dishes left to soak. If we’re lucky, the kitchen is a place we go to keep ourselves alive. If we’re luckier still, it offers an occasion to be tender: with ourselves, with someone else, with the accumulating fabric of our days. There’s weight, and grace, in the way hours stack together. The work they offer us. The waiting they demand.
Photo by Ellen Tanner on Unsplash
