OCTOBER 3, 2019 – I’ve never worked in the kitchen of a high-end eating establishment. At one place and another, however, I catch glimpses of the küchen when the swinging doors swing, as if I’m watching an early film flickering on an old theater screen. Depending on the establishment, the wall that separates kitchen from dining area is often the barrier between loud chaos and quiet order.
When I am at The Red Cabin—our family’s lakeside, woodland retreat—and “work-work” intrudes, I imagine myself in a restaurant, coursing between chaotic kitchen and quiet dining room.
My connection to the crazy kitchen is via my smartphone, my laptop. Ping! I hear my email calling or a text message registering; jingle-jangle-jingle-jang! I hear the phone part of my phone. For a moment here, five minutes there, a full half hour later on, I am sucked into the space where pots and pans clang, waiters yell for their orders, a delivery man drops off cases of olive oil, and sous chefs shout “Ouch!”
But then the phone connection breaks up or my text messages don’t go through or without explanation the internet grinds close to a halt. I type, “Moreover,” which comes out “Noeover.” I press the delete key for a moment too long, and now the entire previous sentence is gone. I shout an expletive, which squelches the whole reason I am here. At that transformative moment, I snap my laptop shut and slide my not-so-smart phone into a half-spin across the table.
To recover my sanity, I leave the chaotic kitchen, swinging doors waving unevenly behind me. I enter the dining room . . .
. . . I repair to the woods, gloomy in the daylight filtered by thick, all-day rain clouds. Glistening in the soft rain, the trees offer a safe haven. Their boughs and branches create a reality that our pride-inducing contrivances can never match. I hear raindrops falling on the leafy canopy overhead, and I’m transported to a world away from the demands and distractions to which our minds and ways have become so addicted. The trees, the plants, the birds and creatures among them—they have no concern for my email, phone calls, or urgent text messages; just as guests in a posh dining room have no awareness of the boisterous kitchen . . . In the soft light over the carpeted floor and tapestries on the walls, care-free and romantic conversations murmur as burgundy gurgles into goblets and filet de sole is served aboard generous platters.
As the world we have created frets and frowns and bangs its pots and pans, we need to connect with the world on the other side of the swinging doors, the world carpeted with moss and adorned by scenic tapestries all around, where the only sounds are of the rain falling softly on the trees above and dripping onto the forest floor below.
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© 2019 Eric Nilsson
