Going Back To The Kitchen

            It’s just a typical kitchen, with all the usual kitchen wares and stock of food kept in a built-in cabinet, not to mention the overlapping bond papers and post-it notes on the refrigerator. Some of these papers were posted once-upon-a-time but my mom told us to just leave them there because the artworks, messages, and reminders make our ref an “electrical diary”. It’s a cute idea, but I wonder if that’s what it’s all about or if those faded papers somehow help her to keep track on how much we’ve grown up in the last few years.

            Not much have changed since the kitchen was renovated three years ago. It is painted in light pink, with patches of white that suggests a repainting, and the floor has the slight roughness of vinyl tiles. At the center is a table for six people, but it is not really used as a dining table because the dining area is separated from the kitchen.  On the three sides were the counters in smooth marble tiles that hold the sink, dish cabinet, and other things. The cooking stuff are kept in the cabinets under the counter, and the stock of food, medicine kit, first-aid kit, and stuff that only my mother knows are in the built-in cabinets that were fixed above the counter high enough for her to reach them.

            The kitchen smells of a dishwashing soap in a lemon flavour. But every morning, it has the aroma of brewing coffee, and sometimes of the fried rice that we used to have for breakfast. And for the rest of the day, the molecules of the smell of foods would dance in the air. If you open the refrigerator, the kitchen would be bathed in the smell of fresh fruits and vegetables, chocolates of my sister from her boyfriend, orange flavour of my niece’s vitamin supplement and paracetamol, cheesecake, juice, and should-be-kept-in-a-refrigerator-once-opened stuff. The sound of a faint hum could be traced back to this refrigerator that stands at the left corner of the kitchen.

            Most of the times, our kitchen would be filled with the sound of running water, the echo of the silver kitchen wares that suggests that either someone’s cooking or someone’s sorting the wares in their proper places, and the timer of the oven going off. And most specially, it would always be reverberating with laughter because it also serves as our hang-out whenever we have nothing to do, like when television shows are not interesting, or when surfing the net becomes too mainstream. This is where we test what the science trivias say, like putting grapes in a microwave oven and they would explode. When I think about these sounds now, I wonder if these, when played simultaneously, can make music.

            Proofreading my first four paragraphs, I suddenly felt like the old times – doing my research paper on our kitchen table because that’s where I did my science experiment.#