Well, Gentle Readers, I have been looking forward to writing this blog almost as eagerly as you have been looking forward to reading it. (What little stinker just said "That's not very much?" Oh, yes, I heard you. Go stand in the corner until your hair turns gray. Or, as it were, grayer.)
I could probably write a tome approximating the size of Moby Dick about the joys of moving to Rockland County - especially dwelling on the part where I spent two weeks scrubbing down all 27 of the oaken kitchen cabinets with Brillo, Murphy's soap, and dozens of rolls of paper towels, because they were crusted with thirty-five years' worth of filth and cooking grease. My fingers are permanently pruney. And that's not a typo - I have 27, count 'em, t-w-e-n-t-y- s-e-v-e-n, assorted drawers and cabinets in my new old kitchen.
One of the reasons this kitchen cleansing has been taking so long is that Her Ladyship, as I have dubbed the former owner of this home, left quite a lot of her material belongings in the cabinets. Predictably, most of it is junk. On the other hand, some of it is pretty nice, and I wonder what she was thinking when she decided not to take all that Spode china along. Not to mention the two Wusthof chef's knives, which, a trip to the second floor of Zabar's will tell you, run about a hundred bucks apiece.
On the other hand, I wonder what she was thinking when she stashed the Hopping Peter (I know it is called a Hopping Peter, because it was still in its original box) - when, as I say, she stashed the two-inch-tall plastic penis - the one that jumps up-and-down on a wee pair of plastic feet when you wind it up - behind the Norman Rockwell mugs and the inevitable "WORLD'S GREATEST GRANDMA" coffee cup. And, as I believe I have already mentioned, Her Ladyship left her false teeth behind in the bedroom closet.
So I have spent a good deal of time getting very hot and dirty and out of temper in the kitchen, ordering take-out food nearly every night because the place wasn't yet fit to cook in. However, by the end of the two weeks, I had scrubbed down most of the cabinets, scoured the wallpaper, and discovered that the ceiling fan with the big globe light wasn't actually yellow - that was just caked-on kitchen grease. (The ceiling fan consumed three and a half hours of my life that I'll never get back, which I could have spent blogging.) We had cooked several meals, and they were good meals, and we were not afraid to eat them, or afraid that the Health Department would come along to close us down. Not only that, but - mirabile dictu, as Virgil was so fond of remarking - the kitchen looks rather charming, in an old-fashioned, country kitchen sort of way. (I mean, allowing for the fact that not one of the cabinet doors hangs straight.) There's not a single granite counter-top in sight, and the first time we turned on the oven there was a blinding flash and a puff of smoke, and I thought my husband had been killed - but, luckily, he hadn't, although he was saying it was a pity that Her Ladyship hadn't been exploded by her own oven. As for the dishwasher - technically, it "works," in that it makes the appropriate noises when it is turned on and then turns itself off after a decent interval. However, since the dishes emerge bone dry (without being at all warm from air-drying) and just as dirty as they were before the appliance was activated, it does not actually work.
It all put me in just the mood to say "The hell with it, let's go on vacation." So we did, and now we are in the Adirondacks in our usual summer cottage, which is far too small to have a dishwasher (other than myself) but which has a magnificent view of the lake and quite a few mountains beyond it, not to mention a little garden out in back of the kitchen that I race out to water while swatting frantically at the myriad mosquitoes, all of whom are far craftier and more intrepid than I, and who seem to have a sort of kamikaze approach to existence and don't care if they die as long as they can lay some hurt on me first. And aside from garden-watering and mosquito-swatting,I am doing very little, indeed, but with a great deal of vigor and determination, and they're going to have to wing me with a rock to get me down off this mountain and back downstate to finish cleaning the rest of that kitchen.
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