My yellow kitchen

The other night fragments from a couple of songs for children suddenly on TV, washed over me. And I needed to let my tears out for a moment.

Here is the story.

After 17 years in our house here at the end of the road we were finally ready for our dream kitchen. I designed it to work with the house finished about 1920. Skilled carpenters would build it and the colour would be yellow. As the sun. 

At that point we realised we needed to divorce.

As the work was already in progress we couldn’t back out of it. For many months we lead the project while not knowing who would live in this kitchen, if any of us. The room turned out the way I had imagined and designed. It was gorgeous and the cosiest and most welcoming you could ever dream of. And a trauma.

The years passed. Husband and kids moved out. Moved on. I was by myself in the yellow kitchen. That wasn’t what I had pictured in my dream. It was wrong.

Over the years I have turned room by room in the house into mine. It’s been a process. But the yellow kitchen has been an unhealed wound. A heavy weight. Too tight on me as well as too spacious.

Unexpectedly, this spring the old water leak from some years back became the key for change in the kitchen aspect. 

It turned out the insurance company would pay a grinding of the floor! The pine planks were marked from a twenty year long life, as well as damaged from the water, so that was indeed a treat. And while I was at it I had that dirty old wall paper painted, as well as the ceiling and the fireplace. Mohammed worked all last winter to clean the sea-stone tile above the stove and then covered it with glass. And my friend Irene is this dark November scrubbing the yellow woodwork from grease and sot, building up during twenty years. I tell you, it takes a 70 year old lady to know how to do that!

So what happened the other night? That thing with the songs? I will tell you.

There was these two musicians, Karin Ljungman and James Hollingworth. In the seventies they released two albums with songs for children. The songs were different from anything you’ve heard before and became hugely popular among children as well as their parents. Hear, at the end of the road, those tapes were played over and over again year after year. As well as in the car. They’ve even been in Seattle, a fun company traveling the Olympic Peninsula and Highway 1 down to San Fransisco. Did the tapes eventually brake? Or are they in a box at the baker’s cottage attic? I don’t really know.

This week Karin Ljungman passed away. And it was in the news coverage fragments of those songs were played. And I had to take a moment. 

Music is such a powerful tool. For traveling in time and age. Heart and soul. Mind and body. 

Suddenly my house was full of life. I could here Trouble & Trouble's happy high pitched voices singing, running around. I smelled my husbands dinner cooking. The wet winter clothes drying on the heated mud room tile floor. The annoying sound of the washing machine doing it’s job. The sounds and smell of a family.

I took my glasses off. To make room for the tears. There were some. But not as many as I was preparing for. 

I made room for all those feelings and images. But within minutes a different room came up. My yellow kitchen. MY yellow kitchen.

The kitchen that now has the most beautiful white stained pine floor looking like new. A white ceiling as well as fire place with no traces of sot. Light-haze-pinkish walls, perfect for creating the gallery that’s been on my mind for so long. And the yellow wood work is actually yellow. 

For all these years I’ve been wanting to repaint the woodwork in a different colour. That yellow was making me sick. The original dream turned into a bad one and I’ve been feeling the need of wiping it away.  

And in the aftermath of the fragments of those songs, the fragments of a vivid memory, I am realising that’s what I’ve been doing these past months. I am good now. I am lighting the candles in the morning while having breakfast. Listening to Sting, Mercury Falling. There is no need for change of colour anymore. After all, yellow was my choice. For the kitchen. My yellow kitchen.