My Mother's Kitchen

My mother’s kitchen really wasn’t so much. It was the kids’ kitchen, the daughters’ kitchen, where red food coloring met peanut butter and dried milk and ice cream in super-special surprises and the big girls ate at one table and the little girls another and the daughter who had to wash dishes after dinner got rewarded by choosing what everyone else watched on TV that night. There were lots of green beans and broccoli, an occasional asparagus and a rare artichoke, and the only dead thing was the flowers that Daddy never gave Mama the time he forgot their anniversary. When Grandma showed up that night, she found the kitchen just as foreign as Mama did.