A Wooden Spoon

Things Remembered, Things Forgot

My youngest daughter stuck a plastic sword through the cabinet pull tonight, declaring victory over her enemies,  and suddenly I remembered a wooden spoon. My grandmother’s kitchen was a tiny thing; even in my memory it is tiny. You know how things always seem bigger when you remember them than they actually were? Well, I remember her kitchen as tiny and pictures confirm that my memory is correct. In her tiny kitchen, the cabinets under the sink were held closed by a wooden spoon. I am not sure whether the spoon was there to keep her grandkids out from under the kitchen sink or whether the doors did not stay closed on their own. It matters not because in my memory, that spoon was vital to the workings of my grandmother’s kitchen. She no longer lives in the house where I visited her for the first half of my childhood; the only way I can remember it is to look at pictures. It was not until I was an adult with children of my own that I realized how important that house was to me. My parents and I would drive a grueling six hours from Slidell to Oxford; my dog and I would be crammed in the backseat next to golf clubs and suitcases. Our car was tiny back then; hatchbacks were all the rage and they were not designed for three people. The backseat was an afterthought, but it was just big enough for a little kid and a bunch of grown up people stuff. I suffered through those Friday night drives, content in the knowledge that one of my favorite people in the world would be waiting at the end for me, silhouetted by her porch light.

I’m not sure how she always knew right when we pulled in the drive; cell phones were not even thought of and we didn’t stop in town to call ahead. Nevertheless, there she would be, waving as our tires crunched on the gravel, pulling into the carport. We piled out of the car, my parents and I and the dog, and my grandmother was happy. Honestly, genuinely, truly happy to see us. I know as an adult how rare it is for someone to be really happy to see me; my grandmother was and she immediately began bustling about, before the bags were unloaded from our tiny car. She always had something hot waiting for us to eat: gumbo, chili, roasted chicken. And for me, since I did not like to eat grown up food, she had a hot dog or macaroni or a sandwich waiting. As I sat at her tiny breakfast table in the tiny eating nook attached to her even tinier kitchen, I would glance over to the cabinets under the sink and see the wooden spoon. All was well with the world; everything was in place and I knew I was home and loved.

As is often the case in life, the good times were not to last. My parents divorced and my grandparents moved away from their home to a different state. I, too, moved to a new town, and all the newness was almost too much for me to bear. The first time that I went to my grandparents’ new house, I was struck by how different it was. A flat, one-story house, it was ugly on the outside and inside. It was even fully furnished. Gone was my grandparents’ furniture that I had grown up seeing; my grandmother’s antiques were packed away and all the familiar pictures that hung in her old house were replaced by tacky beach scenes. As I got out of the car that first time, I resolved to hate their new house. I didn’t care that it was right on the bay and that it had a pier and a beach; it wasn’t their old house and I wasn’t the same girl that had visited them over the years at that beloved house. I was different, the house was different, and none of it was okay.

But then I walked into the kitchen. Tiny, dark, avocado green and harvest gold: I stiffened my resolve to despise the house even more. And then I saw it. The wooden spoon. Stuck through the door handles under the kitchen sink. My anger over all the changes in my life dimmed a bit as I looked at that spoon. I was not instantly happy, buoyed up by a familiar object in an unfamiliar place, but I felt a tiny spurt of happiness. Maybe even a little bit of brightness. I could perhaps be okay one day again. If that wooden spoon could make the change from its familiar kitchen cabinets where it had resided for more years than I had been alive, then maybe I could adapt to what was going on in my tumultuous life.

My grandmother was to move two more times; each time the wooden spoon went with her. Her current house has no need of a wooden spoon and so it does not lie comfortingly within the door handles under her kitchen sink. But she still has that spoon. I’ve seen it and asked her about it. She laughs and says she has no idea why she always had it stuck through the handles; I told her it was important to me as a child and she smiled. My grandmother was a stable person in my life growing up; nothing I did phased her and I knew that I could be just rotten and she would only brush off my terrible behavior or awful attitude and keep on going. She plied me with chocolate cake and coke, especially when I didn’t deserve it. I hope when my grandmother finally goes to her great reward she leaves me that wooden spoon. I will stick it through the door handles of my cabinets. Not to keep them closed or to keep my children out of something, but just to be there, a symbol, a reminder, of all that was good and fine in my life as a child.