When Grandma moved into the house, she brought her mother's, my Great-Grandma Taylor's, cabinets. A fairly modest set of cabinets by today's standards. A simple 60" set all wood with a straight plain design on the doors. All white with simple curved chrome hardware. Uppers and lowers. The lower cabinets have a cool bread box in one of the drawers. White. When I was a kid these were her only cabinets other than a homemade pantry in the corner and a small cabinet under the sink where she kept her wash tubs. Sometime in my teenage years, she got a supplemental metal cabinet she kept in the corner by her washing machine. Great-Grandma's cabinets were still in the house when we bought it. I wouldn't call them white anymore. Brownish really. Maybe like a dark beige. Toasted almond. They haven't been painted. I plan to save them. Scrub. Sand. Prime. Paint. If I soak the hardware handles in cleaner they should shine again like they did when Grandma used to pull them open daily to pull out a cook-book, a spoon, or the bathroom door key when one of us kids would lock ourselves out. Today Stephen and I scrubbed the other cabinets we're going to use in the house - a set of 1948 vintage St. Charles cabinets we bought from a guy in the capital city who was gutting his own kitchen. He said his mom hated them. They are in the shade of Lemonade. If you know anything about vintage St. Charles cabinetry, you might think I paid a "vintage" price for these cabinets. I didn't. The man said he knew what he had, but just wanted to get rid of them. After all, his mother hated them. I was happy to pay him the cash he wanted and drive away quickly before he found one of the websites I had been researching for vintage cabinets and reneged on our deal for any number of better deals he could have gotten. Lemonade -- my favorite color. My favorite drink. It took us seven hours to scrub within sight of clean the entire lot of them. Tomorrow they go to an automotive body shop to be painted - something which is supposed to very closely resemble the 1948 St. Charles shade of Lemonade. I think I scrubbed off dirt and grease that was first placed there in 1948 and never managed to be cleaned. The original owners of my St. Charles cabinets must have paid a lot of money by 1948 standards to have them installed. I imagine it was quite the modern kitchen. Undermount lighting - built in range hood - fixin' to mix-it cabinet (you'll have to google that - very cool feature). Today they sparkled again almost like new. I can't wait to see them all painted with new hardware (the man kept the hardware; his mom must not have hated that) installed next to Great Grandma Taylor's cabinets all sanded and painted. When we pulled out Grandma's cabinets to gut the kitchen there was a dead rat under the lower cabinets. We kept track of our kill finds for awhile. It was a fun game Stephen and Faith and I played while we worked gutting the place. We would work quietly listening to music and then suddenly someone would yell out "Mouse!" "Bird!" or "Rat!" We also found a squirrel and 2 birds - close to 10 mice, and almost 500 wasp nests. I said several times while we were gutting, "if Grandma had known, these walls would have come down decades ago." We lost count eventually. The job got long. We began to get lost in our own thoughts while we worked. Mainly I would travel back while Stephen and Faith traveled forward. I am going there too.
Today in church a man spoke of his wife's death. He imagined Jesus coming and sitting next to his wife on her bed and telling her He had noticed the good things she had done, but that it was time to go home. He imagined this in his mind because one minute his wife was alive and the next she was gone. When they found my Grandmother's body in 2006, I was told it looked like she was praying. Later in her life - maybe the last ten years of it - when you asked her how she was, she used to say, "Oh, I thought the good Lord would have called me home by now." I wish she was here. I wish she was here to see how we are going to fix her house. We'll make it beautiful again. But really why would she care? I'm sure she's got much better accommodations now. If the Lord came to sit on my bed to call me home, He'd probably say, "what was up with that summer you bought this house and completely re-did it. Man, that was crazy!" I wish He'd come have a seat and tell us why we're here. It's hard to explain being "called" to a place until it happens to you. One minute everything in your life seems normal, and the next you feel drawn to another place. The weird part about it was Stephen and Faith felt it too. I may have been the first to say it aloud, but we all knew we were going. We were not "home" yet. I explained it to Stephen this way once: this house, where we are now, is the only place I have ever not ever wanted to leave. He feels it too. Faith too. We don't know why yet. We just know we've been called home.
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