The World Is Ending So Naturally, I Think I’ll Remodel My Kitchen
Simon Abel | UnsplashI’m not actually going to remodel my kitchen. Not anytime soon, at least. But that has less to do with the end of the world and more to do with my very expensive divorce. I don’t mean to sound glib. I’m terrified of what’s around the bend. I’m furious at humankind for letting it happen.
I’m deeply sorry that my children have to contend with this mess of a world. My sister’s friend has a 10-year-old who recently and calmly explained to her that we are on the brink of the largest mass extinction in our planet’s history. He said it makes him feel sad sometimes.
The world is ending so naturally, I think I'll remodel my kitchen
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I ask myself, 'How could we let this happen?' and then I ask myself, 'What are we having for dinner?'
Every day, I grapple with these two questions. I spend a lot of time in my kitchen. I love cooking, mostly because I love eating, and I especially love eating things I cook. I also love snacking on meals as I prepare them, and I love finishing up the scraps of everyone else’s dinner as I clean up.
So yes, it would be nice to have a kitchen that doesn’t cause perennial traffic jams because of the narrow, poorly conceived L-shaped space between the counter and the stove. It would be nice to have a counter that can accommodate stools so my kids can sit and catch up with me while I prep, and maybe occasionally help. I don’t want a fancy kitchen, just a kitchen we can all fit and move around in.
My parents made the kitchen the center of my modest childhood home by knocking down a bunch of walls or, more accurately, hiring someone who knew what they were doing to knock down a bunch of walls.
The kitchen was my favorite room in the house. I ate my breakfast cereal and afternoon snack at the counter on a creaky wooden stool. On the weekends, I embarked on experimental baking projects, which my mother always dutifully ate, even the orange juice cookies and flour-and-water “breadsticks.” She was not one to waste food.
There are a lot of things I currently like about our small, old home, but the kitchen is not one of them. While it thankfully no longer boasts chocolate-brown and mustard-yellow walls, it still feels like a haphazard room. The wood floor is not the same wood floor that graces the rest of the house.
It is clearly a DIY job done by a former occupant on a budget. The pale wood squares, which are an entirely different hue and shape from the warm wood boards in the adjoining rooms, suffer from irrevocable scratches that make the floor look perpetually dirty.
The countertop is tiled. There’s a reason most countertops aren’t tiled. Sometimes I wonder what I could be accomplishing in life if I didn’t have to spend so much time coaxing crumbs out of tile grooves.
I’ve been dreaming of remodeling my kitchen for quite a while. I knock down walls and move around appliances in my head. I envision my kids eating breakfast cereal at the counter on creaky wooden stools.
I fantasize about countertops that are big enough to accommodate all the bags and boxes and spice jars and discarded vegetable parts that accumulate during dinner prep, and surfaces that gleam after a single swipe of the rag.
Whether or not to remodel my kitchen is absolutely a first-world question, but it speaks to the cognitive dissonance of life right now
We’re embarking on house projects as though our futures in said houses are assured. We’re buying properties in places that are flooding, burning, and in some cases, literally crumbling into the ocean. For whatever reason, a whole bunch of people are moving to Florida, even though major insurance companies won’t protect their homes.
For the life of me, I cannot understand it at all, and I also understand it perfectly. Because we still have each day. There are still peppers to chop and potatoes to roast.
There is the exquisite pleasure of a just-ripe nectarine, the drizzling of its juices down the chin. There are spoonfuls of ice cream to snatch out of the container when no one else is looking, and the steady dripping of water through fragrant coffee grounds.
Some days, I decide to embrace my slapdash kitchen, to make peace with its graying floors and tile grooves, to welcome the counter clutter and traffic jams. Other days, I long to create more space, to free the kitchen from its confining walls, to allow my children the comfort of sitting in the heart of the home on creaky wooden stools. And other days, I don’t know what to think or feel. I grieve for a future we haven’t yet lost, then chastise myself for failing to appreciate everything I have.
For now, the kitchen will remain as is. Perhaps, for now, I’ll season my cast-iron pan or organize my Tupperware. Perhaps, for now, I’ll delight in fashioning a meal out of the wilting scraps in my vegetable drawer. Perhaps, for now, “for now” is the best I can do.
Kerala Goodkin is an award-winning writer and co-owner of a worker-owned marketing agency. Her weekly stories are dedicated to interrupting notions of what it means to be a mother, woman, worker, and wife. She writes on Medium and has recently launched a Substack publication, Mom, Interrupted.
