I spent my dark and stormy ‘holiday’ Monday
lurking at the corner of homage and honor,
feasibility and make-believe.
On this day, I started by giving thanks.
I acknowledge the weight, the boulder,
of a faded promise of a great-uncle
who I never got to meet — KIA.
And then I turn to my sketchpad,
time to wring the ROI out of this cloudy day off work.
Designing a kitchen requires many things:
Patience
Vision
Talent
Maths
Engineering
Spatial Awareness
A sense of function, of place.
A sense of belonging,
of interconnectivity, within a greater whole.
And I have but:
Desire
Anticipation
Longing
Aspiration.
And displaced grief
from generations of lost cousins,
absent confidants,
and a highly decorated ghost uncle.
I’m trying to put my life into drawers
Sort out kitchen shears from baking mats
Anticipate how many linear feet of cavities
I need to cradle all my flatware.
I seek to accommodate my neuroses.
Perfection will mask the matters I am unable to process,
despite having a 14-cup Cuisinart with three blade attachments.
Which nook will carry the burden of my KitchenAid Pro?
Where will I hide the enormous counter-top toaster-oven?
How will I walk between the range, the island and the bin?
When will my endless list of Instagram-able
“must have” kitchen elements
deplete my rudimentary architectural designing skills?
No matter how many times I render options,
I cannot figure out the corner.
In every permutation I can conjure,
the space under the window, where the light comes in,
is destined to be a dead corner.
I write "DEAD" diagonally across the space.
It is lost.
I am lost.
I begin to sob.
I compartmentalize my feelings.
I stuff them into the drawers that
I draw on large-scale studio sketch paper
I erase the pain and in its place, a pull-out spice rack.
Perfect.
