Er. Look right. Look left. Look over shoulder. Where’s Frooggy? I dunno. Sleeping it off in his “londry baskit”, I hope. Whew! I can actually blahg about kitchens again without Frooggy taking over my blahg with some ridiculous moooovie.

It is a rather fuzzy photo (you can click — as [almost] always — to get a larger version but it’s still a bit fuzzy). I guess that’s because there’s so much visual information clutter in it that my loverly little powershot couldn’t decide what to focus on. This kitchen, the Moomincabin Kitchen, was installed in 1960. I was six years old. It has been largely unchanged since then. I mean, the original refrigerator and stove have been replaced. The Commander has instituted other smaller changes, as she does every 2-3 years. It is a very small kitchen and, no, there are not any doors on the cabinets. I *think* this was partly to save money and maybe because this is a *summer* cabin on the Shores of Gitchee Gumee and shutting things up might invite humidity. The Commander will have to comment about this because I was six years old and the last thing I wanted to be involved in at that age was kitchen design decisions.

My earliest memories of this kitchen involve sitting in a child-sized chair in the back corner of the room washing my feet so that after a day of running barefoot on the sand, I wouldn’t get sand in my bed. I wonder if that’s why I *still* wash my feet at the end of most days. I would look up at the two-by-fours that met in the corner of the kitchen, holding up the roof. No there is no insulation in the place. Or central heating. And if it gets hot in the summer, you grab a screwdriver and remove the glass insets from the doors and replace them with screen insets. And yes, it gets hot on the shores of Gitchee Gumee in the summer (sometimes).

Again, it is a small kitchen. One great gray-green greasy limpopo Sunday when the Beach Urchins were young and the weather had been awful for days and there were no cousins around to play with, The Commander and I were getting dinner ready and someone yelled “Boat!” That meant that a lake freighter had come into view. Even though lake freighters constantly go up and down in front of Fin Family Moominbeach, the Commander and I got so excited to see *which* freighter was out there that we were bumping butts trying to get out of that kitchen quickly.

I love the Moomincabin kitchen. I love when we open it up in the spring and I hate when we have to close it up in the fall. Fin Family Moomincabin has a small but workable kitchen and my family has served any number of people out of that kitchen at various parties over the years. When we renovate the Landfill Chitchen, we will not have open cupboards and, at least at the beginning, we will not have cosmic debris but we all know that stuff creeps in no matter how hard we try to beat it back. So, I will have my fancy cabinets and my granite countertops and all that stuff and it will be beautiful and I will love it. But my dream kitchen happens in the summer in a tiny kitchen on Fin Family Moominbeach, where there is a grandmoom who once allowed all *four* of her granddaughters (count ’em) to climb up on stools and “help” her cook.

Oh, and you can’t see it but I see an old ski hat of mine from the 60s and I will have to remember that I don’t need to tote my ski band up there next Memorial Day because I can wear *that* hat!

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