My Grandparents Kitchen

My grandparents had two kitchens: one at their winter home which was whatever apartment or house they were living in wherever my grandfather was teaching and the other was at the cottage, the only place they owned, and where they spent their summers. I went with them every summer from the time I was two years old to when I turned 14 and had to start working summers to save for college.

It is the kitchen at the lake that I associate with both of them. It was a very small kitchen, with one small window over the sink. The water for the sink came from the lake: we could not drink it or cook with it, but my grandmother did boil it to wash dishes. The water for drinking came from a well for the whole group of cottages. It was the best tasting water that I have ever tasted: it was always cold, very cold, and I always took a little plastic cup with me to get my first fresh drink right out of the top of the well itself. When I was very young, my grandfather dunked his water buckets into the well water itself. When I was a teenager, that wasn't possible: it had been covered over, and there was a pump that we had to use to get water.

Back to the kitchen. The cupboards were built by a friend of theirs, Mr. Watson, the most marvelous  "old" man I have ever known. While working on the cupboards, he encouraged me to play with the small pieces of wood, sand the edges, nail pieces together to make things. Mrs. Watson was also a favorite of mine: she made awesome desserts.

In that kitchen, with no place to sit, we basically worked. Drinking water from a nearby spring (that was tested by the state)  mentioned above was in glass bottles in the small fridge. My grandfather cleaned and cooked all the fish he caught, cleaning the fish with a special knife that had a black handle, patiently explaining everything he did to me. If it were a fish that I had caught, he held my hand on the knife, standing behind me, showing me how to do it myself. Then my grandmother cooked the fish along with the fresh vegetables of the day that we got from French's farm on the other side of the lake. For dessert, we often had what we called Cottage Pudding, a steamed concoction made with biscuit dough and fresh berries that we had picked during the day: all this was drizzled with a simple sugar syrup.