[birds chirping]
- 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 the encroaching cupboards,
the kitchen sink and dish-stacked 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 back 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.
[music]