Kitchen Part III

This is an old barn and a soybean field in Deltaville, in neighboring Middlesex County. The fields of green soybeans from earlier this summer are now mostly yellow or brown, when they're ready to be harvested. The barn looks like it's seen better days but as I always say, beauty can be found in imperfection.

Speaking of imperfection (for example, a mangled finger or a bizarre family), below is the last part of my mother's story, continued from yesterday.

Part III of Chesapeake Bay Mother's Story, picking up after she caught her finger in a mixer and had to interrupt her father-in-law's shower in order to get emergency help. You know, the usual stuff that happens every day in households across America.

"...we went very fast to the doctor, who had an antique dental drill, and the mixing beaters were drilled off. My hand, which was now blue, was saved, and Middle Child, with whom I was pregnant at the time, has a birthmark on her behind. (I don't know if it's related.)

The doctor drank heavily, as did my father-in-law, while I threw up and got chills--which they said was only shock.*

Is it any wonder that the kitchen has the essence of a bungee jump for me?

Even my mother, with all her kitchen temperament, would probably have agreed.

The hair on my neck still stands up when I hear the sound of a mixer.**"

-Chesapeake Bay Mother

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Chesapeake Bay Woman's Additional Comments and Clarifications

* I wonder how much of that shock could be attributed to the earlier sight of her father-in-law in the shower vs. the trauma to the hand. We may never know.

** The hair on my neck still stands up when I see my mother's finger, which to this day is mangled, particularly near what used to be the fingernail.

The hair on my neck also stands up for the following reasons: dirty laundry, clean laundry that hasn't been put away, clean laundry that gets put back in the dirty laundry by children, ants, fiddler crabs, sinking boats, dirt, clutter, trash, junk, unidentifiable plastic parts that children insist cannot be thrown away, weed-filled flower beds, an icebox that hasn't been cleaned out since the Roosevelt era, litter boxes and cat hair. The End.