The Kitchen Dance

Rebecca is rattling dishes downstairs, and after six days of her absence, I am enjoying the sounds of someone at home. It’s interesting how we go about the dance of sharing a living space- the ways we glide past each other on the stairs, twist and pivot around each other in the kitchen, and jitterbug our way through conflicting needs. In our old tiny kitchen the choreography was so well rehearsed that we could prepare two separate breakfasts on hectic work mornings, in a space the size of a small bathroom, hardly ever bumping hips. As she would open the freezer for her frozen strawberries, I’d duck under her arm to grab the soy milk. While she stood in the tiny gap between stove and counter to blend her smoothie, I knew I had about one inch of clearance to slip by her to the refrigerator. I’d use the opportunity to place my hands low on her hips for a little leverage.
Our little kitchen no longer exists. The floor is there, the two outside walls are still standing, but there is no defined room, and definitely no kitchen. There is a lightened square on the wood floor where the old stove sat for a hundred years. The rafters above are black from some ancient fire, long before our time. And the awkward floor transition that happened in the middle of the kitchen- from the dark low floorboards to the slightly raised and then sloping floorboards of the former porch, is still there. We did our best to make a flattish floor by smoothing out the bump and adding layers of pad and carpet, but there was always a slightly disorienting wave to the floor. We choreographed it into our kitchen routine without even noticing, but it gave the kitchen a slight mystery-spot feeling, and visitors would roll over that patch with a tiny wobble, eyebrows lifted as if they knew something was different here, but couldn’t exactly name it.
The whole house was different like that. On one board that we pulled off the wall was a scratching in pencil, the mathematical figuring that went into the construction of the house. 26+4+4=32, it said. Think about it. It’s no wonder that nothing was square. And although we never really noticed those little off-kilter things, maybe they figured in to the subconscious steps of our dance. Maybe they gave us a slightly tilted perspective on the world, and it was probably for the better.