A gathering place for life’s messes

If THE KITCHEN IS THE HEART OF THE HOUSE, the kitchen table is the heartbeat.

In that sense, my kitchen does not pump blood. It is bereft of even the pretense of a table -- no island, no butcher block, nada. Were it to have that lovely, essential element, a place at which to sit down to breakfast in civilized fashion, I wouldn’t be able to move about. Its dimensions are somewhere in the vicinity of a decent walk-in closet.

Still, it is a kitchen, the place I most want to be when the black and white linoleum floor is freshly mopped and the yellow and white tiled counters swiped and the Western-Holly stove all agleam. That is its condition for three-quarters of a day each week, until it stealthily creeps back into its preferred state of being: slopped up with bits of food on the clean floor, dribblings of oil on the clean counters, dustings of ground coffee beans on the clean stove.

My kitchen wants to be fleshy and full of lust, and so it resists any effort to cast it in a skinny, polite image. Not for it the sterile world of propriety. Too pale and washed out. My kitchens have always, in fact, wanted to live it up, and living it up involves getting into all the stuff of life, and the stuff of life is mess. Cooking is messy, emotions are messy. The kitchen has traditionally been the room in which we make and to which we bring that mess, where we sit and eat and talk and reveal. Win, lose or draw, families got together -- literally faced one another -- at the kitchen table.

In the South, when I was growing up, the kitchen table was where you went for all your information, where Proustian conversations took place in the thick mist of Proustian smells. Like this, from “Remembrance of Things Past”: “Thus there proceeded in our dining room, in the lamplight that is so congenial to them, one of those long chats in which the wisdom not of nations but of families, taking hold of some event, a death, a betrothal, an inheritance, a bankruptcy, and slipping it under the magnifying glass of memory, brings it into high relief....”

All my sleeked-up fantasies to the contrary -- some custom-designed stainless steel Italian kitchen with nothing but a French press pot in view -- I inevitably revert to form. No matter the size, shape or vintage, my many kitchens over the years begin to look the same. So despite not having the blood rush a table would bring, my kitchen today is not without a certain life force. Right now on my tiny counter I have three tall beautiful bottles of farmers market olive oils, a fat bowl of lemons plucked from a friend’s tree, a jar of homemade apricot jam that I can’t bear to open yet because it’s so agreeable to look at every morning, four bottles of red wine, several green and black teas, a row of jars containing pecans, almonds, pine nuts and pistachios, a beat-up Osterizer with missing buttons, a black plastic radio with a yellow dial.

And I know, without saying the words out loud, that such a kitchen is the kitchen I’m genetically designed for, one that reeks of the fullness of the everyday. Still, it’s an incomplete kitchen, yearning for the wholeness a kitchen table would inevitably, gratifyingly give it. Thus it is that I have decided to move on, to leave it behind.

For some months now, I have longed for a real kitchen, one with the space to allow for the table that will bring it fully into its own. A table that will seat enough people for a casual Sunday brunch, or a 4 o’clock tea or a light midweek supper after a movie. The kitchen that is soon to be mine is big enough -- at long last, I have found my downtown loft -- to house a table for four, maybe six, and I am kept awake these last few nights pondering these questions: round, rectangle, square? Oval, maybe? Old and showing its battle scars? (I could just use my once-valuable dining room table, now a chronicle of my nomadic life for the last eight years -- gouged by movers, scratched by dogs, faded by the New Mexico and California sun). Or should I start all over with even the table and design one myself to suit my taste and desires? Those desires being, in short, to fill the space with the nourishment of great food, great friends, great conversation. “We must take pleasure in the little world,” a character in a Bergman film said, as he sat taking his pleasure at table with his family and friends.

My new kitchen is still a blank slate. Not even the appliances are in place, and so it gives the imagination a big, open field in which to roam. My wild horses are running free, at full speed, all over the range. But that’s just for the pure thrill of it. I’m certain of one thing: I will not fall prey to the trend of over-objectifying my kitchen, making it just another room to decorate, of subtracting its spirit, of hiding all the mundane and necessary accouterments of real life behind closed cabinet doors -- or, put another way, of hiding all the passionate, messy emotions that are meant to be brought to and taken away from this, the most primal of rooms.

Barbara King is the editor of the Home section.