New from Old

Lessons from the Kitchen continued

We got the phone call.   Our kitchen cabinets arrive this coming Tuesday.  The reality of what we have done ~ set a kitchen remodel in motion ~ has begun to sink in.  I have just a short time to empty the contents of my current cabinets.  To be honest, I have had this sick feeling in my stomach ever since I wrote the check for those cabinets.  If you know me, you know I'm not a big spender on things.  So once it hit me that I was buying fancy storage boxes for my kitchen, I started asking myself what the heck was in those boxes.  Do I really need all those cabinets for the stuff that I have stored behind their doors?

We own an eclectic collection of pots and pans that merged when we got married and a mishmash of cooking utensils.  I don't even remember what some of them are for anymore.  And we have an entire section of baking pans that I haven't used since our son moved out leaving just the two of us to eat the entire batch of freshly baked cookies.

And three sets of dishes.  Three!  Three sets of crystal stemware, not including the strays we have collected over the years.  Three sets of silverware, two being the expensive good stuff that is not dishwasher safe.  Actually, these three sets that are one of the reasons I wanted new cabinets.  The fancy, expensive stuff originated with my grandmother, my mother and my mother-in-law.  They represent more than dishes, stemware and silverware.  They represent memories.  They represent families.  They represent history.  They even represent beauty.

I haven't been able to display them properly and when it came time to either paint, restore or replace our cabinets, I decided it was time to put those dishes in a place where I could see them daily.  And with better access I could use them more often.  Why keep them hidden away for the next generation to inherit when they might not even want them?  No, better to create new memories and new history, and to display their beauty now.


.