The Origin Point
Where it all starts…and ends.
“Where do I begin?” Shirley Bassey sings at the beginning (duh) of one of her signature songs, which I came to know quite well thanks to her 1995 remix album. This track, remixed by Away Team, became a favorite tune in the early twenty-first century. I burned it onto a mix CD for my friend Vinnie, who was a true Shirley fan of old, and he used to blast it on his deck at his frequent barbeques.
Shirley takes the storytelling advice uttered to Alice at the mad tea party: “Start at the beginning.” Shirley’s song is hopeful, her happiness endless, especially if we play it on loop like Vinnie used to do. She’s always in love, which is the way it should be, right?
I realized a few months ago where my present life starts, the origin point of my current existence. I’m not talking about where I began—technically a hospital in Utica, New York in the early winter of 1973—but where I start and end my days. That of course is the home I share with my husband, two kids, and our dog. I wake up in the primary bedroom (if someone’s snoring hasn’t driven me to the living room couch) and go to sleep there, but there’s another spot in the house where I feel truly awake and attuned to life.
It’s the heart of our home, no surprises there. My origin point is the corner of our kitchen between the stove, the sink, and the window looking out on our deck.
If I stand at the sink, I see our three serviceberry trees dancing in the wind and rain outside the window. If I turn my head, I watch the kids’ activities in the dining room, and spy one corner of our living room with my corner of the sofa and favorite side table. The dog paces from her bowls in the other corner to her food bin next to the wine fridge. My husband drops mail near the coffee station, near the flour and sugar canisters and our glass cake dome. We stack baked goodies there or put pies on display for hungry eyes. Simply by swiveling my head, I take in several of the most important aspects of our home which sum up our interests and activities. That spot feels most like home.
I asked my family to identify their origin points. In cartesian terms, where is 0, 0? My elder son, who has studied (and forgotten) geometry, answered with, “My bedroom” once I reminded him of the concept from math class. That’s a perfectly acceptable answer for a teen. My little one was confused by the question and my husband also shrugged.
I have an answer for him: in front of the oven. In the past year he’s taken up sourdough baking, a few years behind the pandemic-induced obsession with starters and discards, but he now devotes weekend days to kneading, proofing, and heating our oven to smoke alarm level temperatures. I acquiesce the kitchen to him on those days, since I recognize and share his love for baking and taking care of the family. I understand why it’s his new-found passion. It’s a love language, even if Third Grader turns up his nose at sourdough’s tang and Sophomore still refuses to eat crusts (of bread, pizza, or sometimes even pie). “Who’s going to eat all these baked goods?” I wonder on days when my waistband feels too tight. I admonish myself for not being able to resist his breads and scones and pancakes. Unfortunately for the scale we do wind up eating all of it, eventually.
That corner of the kitchen is where I chop produce for salads, soups, and other meals. I wind up there again most nights to wash the dishes that will not fit in the dishwasher. My hips rest against the quartz when I scrub stuck-on bits of dough adhered to our farmhouse sink or pour a drink of water from the tap. (The fridge has a filtered water dispenser but it’s very slow and annoys me. Besides, our water comes from the reservoir on top of Mt. Beacon and tastes delicious.)
Every summer I stand there to cull our berry harvest before canning pint after pint of jam. I rinse peaches and apples clean after our trips to local orchards. It’s the same spot where I strain cranberries and tangerines for Thanksgiving relish and chop sage from our garden for a compound butter rub for the turkey.
Our KitchenAid stand mixer rules that corner, though the food processor enjoys more daily use on average. Since we are both bakers, that machine gets a heck of a workout and sees its share of splatters and spills. I clean it a lot, too. If only that stainless steel bowl could talk about all the different doughs, batters, frostings, and sauces it has held.
That’s my lunch packing spot most mornings. Sophomore doesn’t take lunch to school anymore—he gambles on the high school cafeteria, but Third Grader, our pickiest family member, gets an assortment of snacky items in his lunchbox. Occasionally, into his meal I pop a doodle on a slip of paper or a reminder to bring home his eyeglasses (he has four pairs in constant rotation because he simply won’t keep them on his face). Bob and I have grownup lunch sacks, both army green, and we try to eat up any leftovers and save money on buying food at work.
That’s our cocktail mixing spot that keeps weekend nights flowing. We keep the liquor and wine in a cabinet across the dining room out of necessity, so we carry various bottles and bar tools (shaker, jigger, Luxardo cherries) across and access ice from the fridge door dispenser. That corner is often covered in citrus juice, simple syrup, and rimming salt, even when we’re extra careful. One of us will start to fix “a smart cocktail,” as Bob refers to them, and since we have different palates (I’m not into brown liquors) the other spouse hops in after to craft some other beverage. We’re most likely to overlap on margaritas or tiki drinks, if we do wind up on the same drink wavelength. The ice-filled stainless shaker sweats on a cutting board while we adjourn to the living room in winter or the deck in warmer months.
That spot is also where I retreat after I yell at the kids for talking back, again, or refusing to listen, again. I can busy myself with washing a cup or two while I attempt to reign in my temper. “I need a brain break,” I try to say if they circle back, sensing weakness, to try their case once more. That area of the countertop always needs cleaning as a handy distraction from whatever argument we have at the moment.
Every night I ensure the sink is empty. The dishrack can be full of wet but clean dishes, but I hate greeting another day by dealing with a pile of dirty cups and bowls. That instinct comes from a childhood with a sink filled to the rim with filthy dishes and tepid gray water.
My world radiates out from that corner, where the spokes of life meet. It’s a place of activity. My bed, with its cool percale sheets and weighted blanket, is for rest and retreat. That is my time. When I stand in the corner of the kitchen, I am engaged in the act of giving: creating a home, parenting, husbanding. I don’t feel cornered as in trapped. I feel most powerful.
Not that I feel omnipotent. I know I cannot change the direction of this country or the world. I can’t stop wars from there. As my grandparents learned in the 1940’s, while chaos may rage outside, what I can do is keep the home fires burning brightly. In my own way.
When someone says the word ‘home,’ I picture that corner first. After that, I see our blue front door—the paint chip was labeled “Jazz Club” so just take my money—above the concrete stoop. Then I think of our dining room on a typical weeknight evening, with a crumb-covered table and wadded up paper napkins discarded by careless kids who race from the meal back to their electronic devices. Kitchen. Coming home. Dinner.
It makes sense that I’m drawn to this area because my childhood kitchen also served as my origin point. That room was the opposite of my current one: cramped, damp, grease covered. It was an eat-in kitchen until the big reno in 1991. My mother had always dreamed of having a red kitchen, so she papered the walls with a Bicentennial red design, complete with Liberty Bell, bald eagle, dollar bill pyramid, and Revolutionary drum. Hooray 1976! Please note we will not be putting up semiquincentennial wallpaper (good lord, what would those icons be? A wifi symbol, multiple dollar signs, a battle drone?) in our kitchen.
My father installed faux brick over the sink and painted the original wood cabinets creamy white, the perfect color to show off every fly speck and frying pan spatter. By the time I was fifteen, they read as tan, not cream. The sole pantry cabinet lurked below the sink and was often raided by mice and ants. We kept a crock of margarine on the white enameled stove and piled magazines and school papers on a crumb-filled toaster oven nearby. My mother preferred to do her crafting and painting at our dining table, so the room contained all the culinary devices and materials of a typical Seventies kitchen plus an array of sewing materials, barely separated from each other.
My mom did not wipe down countertops a few times a day nor did she prioritize an empty sink and drying rack. In the original kitchen we only had less than two feet of countertop on either side of the stainless double sink. The coffee pot occupied one side and a perpetually wet towel topped with precariously stacked plates, cups, and bowls moldered on the other. Her spot at the kitchen table boasted coffee rings, an overflowing ashtray, an assortment of pin cushions, paint brushes, glitter pens, and scrap paper pads. From that corner she listened to the radio (classic rock all day), watched squirrels chase each other in Mrs. Miller’s maple tree, and greeted frequent female guests who happened to stop by on their way to or from the village. Often dressed in a stained nightgown no matter the hour of day, she stretched the wall-mounted dial telephone wire to maximum length so she could sit and chat over long distance with new friends across the country.
I imagine that was her happy corner. The slovenly, unfussy mess was a feature not a bug. Eh. To each their own. Even as a kid, I itched to give our house, especially our kitchen, a massive purge and facelift. But now I have the space I longed for then, at heart. I used to dream of a big sunny Victorian farmhouse kitchen, and a Jetsons-inspired midcentury one as I grew older. Our current house is neither style, but we did buy a place with good but sparse bones and played our financial cards right to be able to afford a kitchen reno a few years ago. But even before that, I still gravitated to my corner near the sink and its window.
This is my home within my home. Where it all comes together. I feel centered when I stand there, literally. When the world threatens to cave in, I go there for shelter. When all is right, that is the place where new journeys begin.
Dear readers,
Thank you for reading this far, both to the end of this piece and in this loose collection of memory essays about home and family. When I started this Substack over a year ago, I did not think ahead to having over fifty entries of writings I’ve been meaning to jot down for a long time. But here we are, and I find I have a trove of riches.
For the past year I’ve been working part-time—at first, very part-time, and in October I went to nearly full time. I recently applied for and landed a promotion to full-time employment again. I start my new position next week. This is a very good thing! My family can save for the future (which includes a number of important changes like teens beginning to drive, yikes) and worry a little less about finances. Since I know my writing production dropped after I started working more hours, I know it will slow to a crawl when I return to 9-5 Monday through Friday. I plan to continue writing, as time allows.
This not good-bye. I prefer “au revoir”— until we meet again, the French say. New posts on this Substack likely will be spaced much further apart. I am grateful for all my readers and for the encouragement you have given me. The ultimate satisfaction for a writer is active engagement with an audience of readers, and I am exceedingly grateful to share a few minutes of time with you.
Behave well, be safe, and stay curious. Au revoir.
So look forward to reading your stories, so I will definitely miss reading them on a weekly basis. Understand, life does get in the way.
Tres Bien et bonne chance pour ton nouveau travail!! Vos écrits vont me manquer.