My Mama's Kitchen

Each time I visit my mother, we spend a fair amount of time at the kitchen table. I will always remember the kitchen table as a place for good conversation, a time for picking guitars and singing familiar songs, looking at old photos, drinking pots of fresh brewed coffee and eating fried chicken, chicken and dumplings, bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwiches and strawberry shortcakes (my favorites).

The kitchen was always warm, colorful and inviting. Mom liked to have something beautiful in the middle of the round table, along with a fresh table cloth covering it. The big fan, complete with fluted light bulb shades, is always circling over head.

In recent years when I visit, I like getting up early in the morning, before Mom rises (which isn’t hard to do since she sleeps late into the morning these days and my body clock is an hour earlier than Murfreesboro time). I try to be as quiet as a mouse as I go about making the coffee and empting the dish washer of dishes washed the night before. I can’t resist turning on the CD player, as low as it will go, that sits on the end of the counter top. I usually play songs by mother's favorite, John McDermott, or something my brother sang and recorded for Mom years ago. I love the way the music fills the kitchen. I go out the back door, so as to keep the noise at a minimum, walk around the one hundred year old house to retrieve the Daily News Journal that has once again been thrown in the front yard. Home…it feels like home, more than any other place that I have ever known, it feels like home.

I love sitting in that kitchen, the smell of that old house brings back so many memories. These times of morning solitude are a perfect time to reflect. I can see Mama cooking for Daddy and Daddy waiting to be served all the things that he likes. “Pass the pie, Mama", rings in my ear, late night account balancing, the first meeting of “Rococo”, fashion shows, “me got one”, the children at the table on Christmas day, tearful confessions, and on and on. There is something really nice about being in the same house for 50 years. You just feel at home there, no matter where time has taken you; you are back to your roots.

When Mom rises and shuffles into her familiar place at the table, the side in front of the stove, and pours herself a full cup (she likes it filled all the way to the top) of a good smelling brew, we may spend another hour or two just sitting there talking about everything we can think of, before beginning the events of the day.

Yeah, I really like a round kitchen table and in that big kitchen on 600 North Church, that same table has made a lot of people feel like family for 50 years, it isn’t fancy, but it works.

So go home, whenever you can, so you too can sit there once again and make a memory. Connnect with your roots.

Merry/Mom