the woman in the kitchen

The Woman

in the Kitchen

Since she had little to give me, she gave me the world

By Gary Allen Sledge

My mother looked like a photograph by

Dorothea Lange, one of those Depression-era

children pinned against a backdrop of bare

boards and a denuded landscape. She was

fragile boned, with eyes deep and dark as if

bruised by sorrow. Yet I realize today, ten

years after her death, what uncommon courage

she possessed. What pioneer strength she had

to transform a life that others would call

ordinary into something wonderful for those of

us blessed to call her daughter, sister, wife and

mother.

She never let us look down. Though her own

life was filled with harsh circumstances, she

believed that the future would be better as

soundly as she believed in God. She showed us

this conviction daily, and yet the earliest tale I

heard her tell about herself was of a little girl

who had to give up what she loved best. This is

the first story in my mother's "Tale of Three

Stoves."

"Joanna," her mother said in Hungarian. "You

must choose. You can take only one toy with

you. There is no room."

The girl is eight, maybe nine, and thin as a

waif. She is deliberating with great seriousness.

"Yes, Mama."

Her brother and older sister, running in and out

of the plain clapboard cabin, are ecstatic

because tomorrow the train will take them

away from these West Virginia hills forever.

Her brother, John, comes into the kitchen

carrying Father's shotgun. He puts it behind the

front door so he won't forget it. "Hurry up,

When I was old enough to go to school, she

and I moved to Antioch while my father stayed

on the mountain. She rented two rooms in a

tumbledown, century-old house by the river for

$10 a month.

There was 50 feet between us and the water,

and the Southern Pacific railroad cut right

through them. In the late afternoons, we'd take

a walk along the tracks. My mother had and

abiding love for perspectives. Tops of hills,

ocean shores and riverbanks were her natural

habitat.

We'd sit on the huge stones of the levee and

she'd tell me stories about the freighters

churning upriver to Sacramento. Sometimes a

crewman would come to the rail and wave.

"That man probably breathed the air of China

or walked the shores of the Philippines," she'd

say, "where there are palm tree jungles and

butterflies big as kites."

Some Sundays we visited my grandmother

who lived on the outskirts of town, where the

ancient sea-bottom hills rolled up to the flanks

of Mount Diablo, one of the highest peaks in

the Coast Range. Mother and I would climb the

first ridge and look over the town and the San

Joaquin Delta.

There was something in her demeanor at such

times that said: One day this will be all yours.

Since she had little to give me, she gave me the

world. It was about that time I began to view

her as a forlorn creature, one of those maidens

imprisoned in some dark tower, or toiling

unobserved in the kitchens of and ignoring

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little goose," he tells Joanna, who is studying a

rag doll and a black cast-iron toy stove.

They are her only real toys, and she loves them

dearly. They were bought by her father, one

each for the last two Christmases. Now she is

allowed only one, because the family is

carrying everything they own to California, and

will be charged by the weight.

The year is 1929, and the town they are leaving

is Monclo. There, a village of Hungarians work

in the coal mines at the end of a railroad line,

where the train cannot turn around and has to

back up to leave.

It is a world I can barely imagine. It is not

merely that there was no TV or telephones.

Hers was a world of singular things. One pair

of shoses, one kind of cereal, one pencil, one

schoolbook, one winter coat. It was a world

where alternatives were few, choices crucial,

and loss a fearful possibility.

"Which one did you choose, Mommy?" I used

to ask, even after I knew the story.

"The doll."

"Because you loved it best?"

"No, because the stove was heavier and I was

afraid there wouldn't be room for things my

mother needed to take. I loved the stove best."

"What did you do with it?"

"The night before we left, we stayed with

neighbors, the Demjens. Mary was just my age

and my best friend. We used to play together,

baking mud pies on my stove. I thought she

would take good care of it. So I gave it to her."

Mother held out both hands, re-enacting the

mythic transfer.

"And Uncle John left the shotgun behind the

door and got a spanking, right?"

"Right."

She told me these and other stories to teach me

the survival skills of self-denial, so I would

never fear want. But she also fed me Cream of

Wheat, cabbage rolls and a wondrous banquet

patriarch.

I remember her now at a church dinner, with

the third stove that marks her story. I was a

teen-ager, already making my own way,

self-satisfied with my prospects for which she

and my father had sacrificed so much.

Suddenly I caught one of those glimpses of

adult reality that come to the young as a special

revelation.

It was a "Church Luau," and the menu was

pineapple this and coconut that and egg foo

yong. I was a youth representative at the head

table, sitting with the pastor and the church

leaders. I went into the kitchen to get more to

eat. It was jammed with jostling, sweating

ladies, and there, working at the hot six-burner

stove, was my mother, face steamed and flush,

turning a mess of eggs in a long cake pan.

Somehow, with that callow reaction known

primarily to teen-agers, it embarrassed me to

see her toiling away there. I tiptoed back

outside.

After dinner, the men and women at the head

table had their places cleared, and the minister

began his announcements. "First, let's bring out

those ladies who made all this possible."

There was a round of applause. A hesitant line

of women came out. Mother, last of all, was

the tiniest one, standing closest to the door.

Again it shocked me to realize that my

mother—who was everything in my eyes—was

not one of those who sat up front on the dais,

but was one who served in the kitchen.

Why was she never rightly rewarded or

recognized? I felt a curious mixture of

resentment for the leaders and yet a new

appreciation for this woman who, all her life,

had given herself away. Counting herself not

worthy to sit at the head, she served. The

minister was more right than he knew: she was,

for me, "one of those ladies who made

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of books and the Bible, so I would never feel

empty. Her Biblical hero was Joseph, who rose

from the pit to the pinnacle because he learned

how to serve.

For three years, while my father was fighting in

the Pacific, she raise me alone. It was during

this long isolation that she wrote down the

story of the stove for her old friend Mary, and

as a family keepsake. She wrote with a No.2

pencil on brown grocery bags because paper

was scarce during the war.

When my father returned, he and a couple of

other ambitious young men borrowed money to

buy a small stand of timber on a range of hills

above the Russian River on the northern

California coast. Together, they went into

logging.

My mother and I went along. It was an ideal

situation for a boy of six. We slept in

Army-surplus tents and used a two-holer dug

behind a thicket of pine. On the opposite side

of the camp was a shed where blasting caps

and dynamite were stored. I was forever

warned to but forever tantalized by

the danger. I played under the six-foot circular

saw blade, and heard the whack of the ax into

the thick hide of redwood, the dying thunder

crack of great trees, and the roar of the diesel

tractor belching black smoke. But while I

climbed trees and played in the rushing stream,

my mother cooked for half a dozen

lumberjacks on a Coleman stove, carried water

up 57 steep steps from the stream for drinking

and washing, and pressed work shirts with

flatirons heated in wood-fire coals.

I can still see her, a lock of hair loosed from a

red kerchief, scrubbing a blackened pot with

sand. Or baking potatoes among the pulsing

embers in the open pit. Once, my father was

paid for an order of redwood with cases of

Army-surplus Spam, and for months my

mother turned it into breakfast, lunch and

everything possible."

She never had the opportunity to turn her

dreams into something entirely her own. Her

story was written out on paper bags with a No.

2 pencil, and never saw print. But because of

the wealth of imagination she poured into us,

my brother and I had the benefit of love,

security and the rewards that she and my father

squeezed from their livelihood.

I went to college, married and moved to New

York. In a very short while, Mother got sick. It

was an auto-immune disease. Her liver was

rebelling against itself.

A few years before she died, she planned a trip

to New York to see us. Then she began to

dream. Maybe she could make a bigger trip of

it. Go back to West Virginia. It would be the

first time in nearly 50 years she would see her

native hills. A quick exchange of letters with

her old childhood friend Mary Demjen

arranged everything.

The reunion completed a circle for my mother.

There was cake and coffee, white linen and old

silver, and table talk about people and places

gone by. The two women lingered, like

playmates reluctant to give up their enjoyments

in the late-afternoon sun.

As they were about to part, Mary pretended to

remember something. She went into the other

room and brought out a small box wrapped in

white paper.

My mother made small protests, expecting

some local memento of this wonderful

occasion. But as she unfolded the paper, her

hands began to tremble. A shape out of

memory revealed itself. A small black stove. It

still had the little burner lids and a skilled to

cook mud pies.

Her eyes filled with tears, but her face was

radiant. "Mary, you didn't forget," she said

softly. "It's just as I remembered it. What I

always wanted."

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dinner in a hundred disguises.

For the four years that they struggled on that

ridge, my mother created a magic realm for a

child. In the evenings she and I would walk out

to the knoll and watch the does bring their

fawns to drink at our stream. She supplied the

commentary to our lives. "Remember the night

the mountain lion jumped over the tent?"

"Remember how it rained for a week and the

cots sank in the mud?" "Remember when you

got tick fever?"

My father had the right idea. California was

throwing up tract houses by the thousands. But

the larger mills in the area used threats and

extortion to run the little ones out of business.

It was a plan that was born to fail, I suppose.

And with it, to a certain extent, my parents'

youthful expectations failed. My father went to

work in the postwar factories that grew up

along the San Joaquin River. It was an

important sacrifice for both of them. It meant

the displacement of their dreams to assure a

future for me and my newly born brother,

Robert. It never occurred to them to duck this

responsibility. They did what they had to do.

Which brings me to the story of my mother's

second stove.

One morning Mother was cooking outdoors on

the Coleman, which sat on a plank table under

a tree. The gas tank must have been pumped up

too high, because the flames shot several feet

in the air. A low-hanging tree limb caught fire.

Gasoline must have leaked; the table ignited. A

burning branch fell in the dry grass, and the

fire spread.

"Get back! Run for help!" she called to me. But

I couldn't move. What if the fire reached the

dynamite shed? I stood there with a cup of

water and toothbrush in my hand, feeling

cowardly and useless. Mother was 95 pounds

dripping wet, but she heaved shovelful after

"My mother kept it all these years," Mary said

graciously. "You know how mothers are."

The two grown women cried in one another's

arms.

It's Difficult to know what counts in this world.

Most of us count credits, honors, dollars. But at

the bulging center of midlife, I am beginning to

see that the things that really matter take place

not in the board rooms, but in the kitchens of

the world. Memory, imagination, love are some

of those things. Service to God and the ones we

love is another

I once asked my mother, "If you could have

anything you ever wanted, what would you ask

for?"

"Nothing," she said, touching my head in that

teasing sort of common benediction mothers

give to inquisitive children. "I have you, Rob,

Dad. I have everything."

At the time, I didn't believe her. Now I have

two children of my own, and I finally know.

I have a mental snapshot: my mother in her last

months sitting outside in the sun, her swollen

legs propped up on a pillow. Her chair is

sinking into the wet grass. Her head, covered

with a floppy red hat, is nodding down. But

nearby, almost within reach, on the concrete

walk which sparkles in the afternoon sun, is a

small black stove with little burner lids, and a

skilled for cooking mud pies.

My brother, Robert, has it now. It sits in a

place of honor, on a shelf in the sun porch of

his home in Oakland. It stands for simplicity,

courage, grace and service. It stands for the

woman in the kitchen.

A veil parts for me. Tine turns back upon itself.

I see the whole cycle of her life as one dance,

one ceremony of kindness and self-sacrifice.

In my mind's eye I see her standing by the

door. Don't hold back now, don't cast your

dark eyes down. Come out of the kitchen. Come

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shovelful of dirt on the growing wall of flames.

I was afraid the gasoline would explode and

she would disappear in a ball of fire. But she

kept throwing dirt on the table and stove, and

finally the fire went out.

Afterward she came to kiss me on the cheek,

marked by dried toothpaste. Only then did her

fear and relief express themselves. It was the

only time I saw her cry.

up here to the table, Mother, to the very head.

Questions:

1.

What is indicated in the title” the woman in the kitchen”?

2.

What is the purpose of putting the author’s realization of his mother at the

beginning of the essay?

3.

Structurally and thematically, time is an important device in this story. Explain

why?

4.

In the development of this essay, the stove is most important clue. Do you think

the three stoves have any different implications?

5.

Analyze the structure of the essay .

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