PIE COOLING ON THE SILL
Pie Cooling on the Sill
FLOUR ON THE COUNTER
Flour on the Counter
BUTTER LEFT OUT
Butter Left Out
KETTLE WAITING
Kettle Waiting
RHUBARB IN A COLANDER
Rhubarb in a Colander
LINOLEUM AT TWO P.M.
Linoleum at Two P.M.
designer's notes — M. V.
The kitchen of the farmhouse on County Road 8 outside Wooster faced east. Grandma's apple pies came out of the oven at six in the morning and went straight to the sill above the basin to cool. By 1971 the sill paint had aged through about a thousand pie-bottoms to exactly this — not pink, not cream, the color a windowsill becomes when it has been the resting place for one long Sunday habit. I matched it Tuesday from a chip of the actual sill my mother saved for me when they sold the house in '79.
Pulled the warmth off the inside of a King Arthur paper bag under three different fluorescences in the print shop downstairs. Mother sifted bleached unbromated into the wooden trough on the counter and made a well for the eggs. The light through the side window was always this color of dust by the time the dough was ready.
Flour on the counter,
her hand showed mine how to fold,
that kitchen is gone.
The Princeton Avenue house came down in '88 to widen the access road behind the new Walgreens. I keep one of her flour tins on my own counter now and the flour still lands the same way.
Summer of 1962, the rental on Mayfield Road. No central air and no proper refrigerator yet — just the icebox we kept the milk in. Butter sat in a covered glass dish on the counter from May through September and went the color of an old violin neck after a week of afternoons. Pratt & Lambert has never made this color because Pratt & Lambert pretends nobody ever ate butter that wasn't refrigerated. I am putting it in the deck.
My grandmother's copper kettle on the back ring of the gas stove all afternoon. Not whistling — whistling means the water boiled and got used. This is the color of the kettle sitting between uses, taking the four-o'clock light off the south wall and giving it back a little warmer than it came in. Tested it against three real kettles. The Akron Light & Power copper-bottom from '58 came closest.
First house, first spring, first kitchen we were allowed to repaint. Carl's mother brought rhubarb in a green plastic colander from her own back yard and I left it in the sink while we ate dinner. The kitchen light from the overhead frosted globe came down through the colander holes onto the pink stalks, and there it was, already pre-mixed in the colander. I just wrote it down.
The linoleum in the apartment over Mrazek's bakery on West Tuscarawas, late afternoon, second week of August 1976. South-facing kitchen window with no curtains because we hadn't bothered yet, the light hitting the floor for about forty minutes around two and turning the dull walnut-pattern linoleum into something honestly worth painting a wall after. Carl came home and said the floor looked rich. It did. It does.
This one was never approved for the deck. Marketing said no homemaker paints her kitchen this dark and Becker from sales said it would scare the chip-takers in the Builders Square aisle. I left it on the master sheet anyway, because it is the most honest color I made this year. At eleven at night when you come down for a glass of water and only the hood light over the stove is on, every kitchen I have ever lived in has been exactly this color. I matched it from memory and then I matched it again the next night standing in my own kitchen at eleven o'clock to make sure. It is correct.