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- Early in our courtship,
my wife Anneliese took me to visit Tom and Arlene,
an elderly farm couple
she'd grown close to during her teenage years.
We stepped through the screen door
and seated ourselves in the kitchen.
The kitchen is small and close,
dominated by the bulwark of a cast iron wood range
dating to 1893.
Add to that encroaching cupboards,
the kitchen sink and dish-staked countertops,
a refrigerator,
a modern electrical stove and an overloaded coat rack,
and there's not a lot of room to maneuver.
The wooden floors are dark brown and unpolished
but worn to smoothness by over a century of boot soles.
The table, as I've come to know
over the course of many subsequent visits,
is always happily cluttered with mail and pens
and notepads and cookies and saltines
and always a Skippy jar filled with peanut M&M's.
The worn floor, the dim corners,
the bacon grease undertones,
this is the same kitchen I've known
from clear back to my grasshopper-size days
in Sampson township.
These are not the kitchens
of slick magazines and stainless steel appliances.
These are the kitchens of clutter and stack,
of the dishrag hung and the pans piled,
of the countertop bucket
spilling onion husks and potato peels.
Company is happily received
with no preemptive clearing of the decks.
Just clomp right in, boots and all.
Your chair is waiting.
More often than not, left at an open angle,
ready to receive the next visitor.
What I'm saying is,
"The first time I walked through Tom and Arlene's door
with Anneliese and stepped into that kitchen,
even though I had never been there before,
I knew exactly where I was."
When Anneliese and I left that night
and after I had dropped her off
and was headed by to my very bachelor home,
there had been a key change within me.
As I watched her laugh and trade stories,
I saw signs of an old soul.
A person who paid her respects
and paid them to the sort of people
much of the world passes by at top speed.
Prior to our night in Tom and Arlene's kitchen,
I saw Anneliese as beautiful,
desirable, smart and strong.
More than enough in other words
and easily more than I had earned.
But as I watched how she honored Tom and Arlene
with nothing fancier than honest talk and clear laughter,
I began to realize I had found a person
perfectly and unpretentiously matched
to the roughneck kitchen of my dreams.
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