MY STORAGE EXPANSION PROJECT

There is nothing like kitchen renovations to make you see how complicated we make our lives by owning too much stuff.

And, there’s nothing like owning a kitchen with way more cupboards than usual to make you see how having a ridiculous amount of storage space leads you to storing a likewise ridiculous assortment of such stuff.

Weirdly it was my interest in wanting even more ergonomically friendly storage options that set this renovation in motion.

This means, if all goes according to plan, by the time we are done this adventure I will have even more storage area than I started out with. This is even in spite of my swearing when I emptied out all those cupboards that a significant portion of it was not going back in when the reno job was done.  Knowing my penchant for hoarding totally useless things I’m not quite sure at this time which three items are not liable to make the cut. 

What I’m striving for here is more useful space.  Kitchens have evolved a lot over the past century.  My great grandmother probably didn’t have much for cupboards because she didn’t have much for crockery and her pots and pans were likely seldom not in use and put away.  Besides, that big old cast iron cook stove took up most of the space.  Her daughter inherited her mother’s kitchen and no doubt the dishes and utensils as well, but I don’t think anything else changed.

Women of my mom’s generation had no choice to get more cupboards – they were now into the Age of Tupperware.  Trying to corral all those bowls and lids is not for the faint hearted.  The struggle is real.

The kitchen I’ve operated for the past 37 years has double the cupboards any kitchen should have.  Half of them came with the original tiny kitchen of the original tiny house and the rest were doubled when we doubled the size of the house and the family.  The over abundance of spaces I can hide by closing cupboard doors is phenomenal.  I’ve been married twice, raised four kids, and attended countless Tupperware parties, and I throw nothing away.  My daughters live in terror of the day I die and leave it all to them.

And yet it would seem that it was not enough storage.  I wanted more.

Well, not so much more storage, as better storage.  Somebody (almost surely a woman) has come up with all kinds of smarter storage options.  Things like upright dividers to keep your multiple cookie sheets and pizza pans from avalanching when you’re digging for your muffin tins – speaking as one who has had that whole business land on her toes more than once, I am quite excited about a system that makes gravity work for me, instead of against me.

But so much more than that, I cannot wait for the drawers that are going to replace the deep lower level cupboards that sucked all my favourite bowls to their back, forgotten, hidden places waiting for a day I felt spry enough to hunt them down.  My spry days are getting fewer and farther between all the time.  These drawers are going to deliver my things to me without some kind of hunting expedition.

This is almost surely the last renovation we will do to my kitchen, but I feel that it’s the most important one.  I may have quite a few good cooking years left to me if I don’t have to fight my cupboards for their contents any more.

 A major part of the carpentry part is done and we await the cosmetic application of paint before the doors and hardware are put back on.  This is so exciting!

Meanwhile I’ve been losing sleep as I spend the hours of 12:30 until 3:15 every night deciding where everything is going to go.

Oh yes, and which three things that will go off to a garage sale in the spring.

FEBRUARY INFIRMITY

You would think at my age I would have learned to cope with Spring Fever a little better than I do.  The truth is, though, it gets a little worse every year,

I’ve thought about this a lot (while standing in the sunbeams from my big south-facing picture window) trying to sort out whether this is because the illness strengthens as time goes by, or because I am getting older and more susceptible to its contagion.  I suppose it may be a bit of both.

The main symptom is the longing for anything green and growing.  I have one large-ish house plant that stalwartly refuses to die, and even treats me to the odd new frond from time to time.  It’s green, and growing, and I admire its tenacity, but by mid February it’s just not enough.  The sun spends more time in the sky, the seed catalogues are all here, the potatoes are sprouting in the basement – stuff wants to grow and I want to grow it!

Let me just say that planting seeds in mid February is great if you want spindly, weak-kneed seedlings in a couple weeks.  I know this because I am a repeat offender.  This is too early if you have nowhere but a little table in a south window to put them.  You need a better set up and more space.

So, two years ago my enabler built me a two tier shelf to sit up by that window.  I went hog wild and planted everything I could think of.  The seeds grew and needed to be transplanted into larger containers.  My enabler went out and built me another two tier shelving unit.  The shelves were all full.  The window was all full.  On the one hand things were green and growing and reasonably sturdy; on the other hand it was now only the end of March and still weeks from being safe to put the babies outside in the ground.  Although most of them did survive till their garden debut the shock of moving such large plants to a new environment set them back considerably. 

Like about a month.  Like about the exact amount of time I should have waited to plant them in the first place.

Last year my enabler went out and built me a small greenhouse in the back yard.  I’m not sure of his motivation.  Was it the nuisance of two shelving units over flowing with plants in the living room for three months the year before?  Was it that he just loves going bigger and better?  Was he just bored one day and thought he should build a greenhouse?  Or was it his farmer genetics kicking in; it this how male spring fever manifests itself?

At any rate, in came the two shelving units and the starter soil and the seeds.  Now that I had somewhere to move the seedlings to once a reasonable temperature could be maintained with heaters out in my new playhouse there was no need to hold back.  Well, except for that still-way-too-early thing. 

It’s so hard, in the throes of spring fever, to keep the soil away from the seeds and the sunshine.  One thinks “oh just this one little package won’t hurt anything” and the next thing you know there are several small forests of seedlings.  And in the process of transplanting these many babies to larger containers they lose touch with their name tags so you don’t even know who’s who by the time you move them to the greenhouse.  And it ends up there are way too many of the short things and not enough of the tall ones.  If I learned anything last year when dealing with such abundance it was to WRITE THINGS DOWN.

So, how am I doing so far this winter, you ask?

Well, so far only one of my window shelves has made into the house and only a few perennials have been planted.  I have several baby lemon trees doing great and out of curiosity I planted grape seeds to see if they would sprout too.  There are no fast growing annuals anywhere close to dirt at this time.  My restraint impresses even me.  I had even thought maybe I had developed some kind of immunity to Spring Fever’s pathogen.

That was until I was doing laundry this morning.  As I pulled the clothes out of the washing machine and tossed them in the dryer door I happened to glance out that big window that overlooks my backyard.  It wasn’t the greenhouse that caught my eye, it was my clothesline.  Obviously missing green, growing things is only one facet of this disease.

One of the prime indicators of Spring Fever is heavy, wistful sighing.  It’s all downhill from here.

*Sigh* I can’t wait to smell sheets and towels hung outside to dry.

*Sigh* 

 SISTERHOOD

As my ideas for this post began to coalesce in my mind the title of a Willie Nelson/Julio Iglesias song kept popping up – you may remember it, To All the Girls I’ve Loved Before?

I Googled it to refresh my memory of the lyrics.  It really is a pretty song, but the love that they sing of is the romantic kind – not where I’m going with this at all.

While this IS dedicated to all the girls I love it has nothing to do with romantic love.  The love I speak of is much more fundamental.  It is the unspoken sisterhood, the shared experience of being feminine, the mother/daughter/sister/friend role we fill for each other ... whether we have met each other, or not.

I may be wrong but the connection that women feel toward one another is something that probably couldn’t be explained to men even if we gave classes on the subject, but we know it merely by instinct. 

Even in the case of total strangers we offer each other support in times of adversity: imagine a scene in a grocery store - an overwhelmed mom, an uncooperative and angry toddler, defiance and howling in aisle 3.  This is the stuff of despair and loneliness until another woman comes along.  No words need to be spoken, all that happens is that their eyes meet in a been-there-done-that kind of way.  Kindness is shared.  A smile comes to both of them – a virtual fist bump of solidarity.  Some days it’s the difference between serenity and insanity.  We women are good at that.

That’s the broad spectrum ‘we’re all in this together’ way to describe this sisterhood we belong to, but there are as many levels as there are women.

Sisterhood, of course, begins with our flesh and blood sisters if we’re lucky enough to have them.  It’s where we learn shared experiences, empathy, and how strong we can be together.  I was blessed with five sisters but in the past decade have had to say goodbye to two of them.  The remaining three are now all the more precious.

Fate has given me an abundance of sisters-in-law, an extended family of girls with so much in common.  We have watched our children grow up together, laughed and cried our way through what life has thrown at us, and shared some darned good recipes over the years.

This special bond also bridges generations.  My grandmother’s strengths and ideals flowed through my mother and travel on through me to my daughters and granddaughters.  It’s done in subtle, quiet conversations over the years, and also in helpless, gasping, snorting laughter when the mood strikes us. 

And then there are the school sisters we grew up with and our work world sisters and our shared hobby sisters.  There are the ones we’ve known, but not known, all our lives whose importance bubbles up in our sixth decade because this seems to be our time.  And the ones who retreat into the background and then re-emerge over the years for the best kind of reunions you can imagine.

In the bigger picture we don’t even need to know our sisters to be able to recognise them. 

I have one ‘sister’ who lives two provinces away.  I’ve never met her personally and if not for a chance encounter with her mother and son during a monsoon in Beijing not even our Face book paths would have ever crossed.  That’s how heavy the odds were against us, but due to our long and heartfelt conversations on Messenger, I recognize her to be one of my special sisters.  Some day we will meet.  It is meant to be.

And then there is the friend who inspired this whole train of thought.  We only met in our mid thirties and although we worked for the same employer our connection grew from our shared experiences, not close contact.  We are both retired now and still only manage to touch base every once in a while, yet I feel her insights are at times vital to my psyche and I know she feels the same way about me.   Our conversations are like hitting the reset button in our lives.

I look at it as another, more advanced, version of a virtual fist bump, but it serves the same purpose: the difference between serenity and insanity some days.

This is dedicated to all the girls I love – we’re all in this together.