Farmhouse Kitchen

Viola Davis’s rich, contralto voice filled the space in my kitchen when I canned pickles in it for the first time. Listening to her read her memoir (on the Libby app) was moving and left a lasting impact. While she mentions sitting with her mother in a kitchen with marble counters later in the book, that was not her childhood experience. Davis tells of the extreme poverty of her childhood and the trauma of abuse within her home. It leaves a lasting imprint on her, but it is not the end of her story. She keeps putting one foot in front of the other in spite of her circumstances and developed a necessary tenacity for moving forward. The love and heldness she experienced with her sisters was a saving grace.

There is little to no connection between listening to “Finding Me” by Davis and the newly finished kitchen in this old, stone farmhouse other than listening to it while working in this new space. However, I recommend it if that sort of narrative interests you. It’s not an easy listen, but I found it worth my while. If profane language is off-putting, a heads up. Davis speaks her truth unflinchingly.

Swearing was within easy reach by the end of our kitchen upheaval with the disruption and mess in our living space. That disruption is a necessary aspect in a project like this, but it is by far one of the least pleasant. It is very good to be on the other side of the mess (though the cellar still wears an extra layer of construction grime).

We had talked about redoing our kitchen for years and eventually it was just time to do it. Not wanting to lose our wood-burning cookstove, we explored reconfigurations of our kitchen space and came up with nothing. Then the idea came to me to create an opening where our kitchen window was and add on a room to house a roomy kitchen. When I told this to my friend Dianne, she suggested a room with windows all around to compliment the solarium on the south side of the house. And the rest, as they say, is history.

Dreaming and designing this kitchen space was life-giving. I am a thrift store, Re-store, find-it-beside-the-road, FBMP kind of person, so where possible, I incorporated that mindset into the space. However, I must say, the brand-new, custom-built cabinets with their soft-close feature has been money well-spent. The sparkle of the glass knobs fills me with pleasure (a sister calls a kitchen’s knobs and hardware the jewellery of the kitchen). As a child, I loved rocks and collected them in a pail that was kept outside our house. My granite countertop feels like an extension of my rock-collecting childhood pastime as I see the veins running through it and feel its cool smoothness. The natural light and the views outside all these north-facing windows are giving us a whole new perspective of our place. A sister likened it to a natural wallpaper. Yes, all these windows do get peppered in fly shit (we live on a working farm after all) and don’t clean themselves, but the panoramic vista is worth it. When the morning sun filters in, casting the worn surface of the harvest table in a warm light, the task of keeping the windows reasonably clean diminishes.

Though the kitchen is new, it has a look and feel of having always been there. It compliments our old farmhouse rather than competing with it. We are looking forward to seeing the snow fly outside these windows in the years coming.

…she looked at it and saw that it was good…