Grandpa’s kitchen was narrow, and long, made from a box-car, off of the Rock Island Railroad, that scurried about southern Oklahoma, as much as an after thought of its railroading life, hauling rail cars and products from Chicago out to New Mexico in the 1800’s. There was no known date to those of us who used it as a kitchen, just under eight feet wide, and forty feet long.
It was brought in and it’s wheels removed, and cobbled to the ground and sat next to the two room shack that looked as though they had never been painted.
The wide doors removed, the wood repurposed, a window cut in to the end, and one on the south, and an open doorway between house and car, and a screen door on the outside, with a spring tight enough to make the door pop each time it closed.
Insulation was too expensive, the roof was metal, the treated lumber that served to hold the roof up, was the same wood that had ridden the car through thousands of miles, thousands and thousands of pounds of untold freight that was loaded and unloaded at station after station.
Each full sized 2x4 was polished slick with time and effort and we’re marred by carrying freight, and painted on the inside white, for Grandma's pride of living. The floor was rough and linoleum lined it, looking back through the years.
Grandpa grew peppers outside in the twenty feet from the door to the fence, and hung them up on the walls to dry.
Grandma stood in the kitchen, in the summer time, when the body would sweat so bad, when you would try to breathe, when the gas stove held boiling water, covering each jar of canned food they would make. They would can so early in the morning, when darkness still held the light off of that metal roof, and fill the jars with okra, tomatoes, pickles, dill weed fresh from the garden, small potatoes, carrots, and any piece of homegrown produce you could find, would turn day after day, into next winters meals, all canned fresh, the day or the day after it was pulled from the garden.
The porcelain dipper, this white and very clean, was kept up in the rafters, hung by a piece of baling wire wrapped around itself many times, and the table that was full of hot jars that had just been canned or the hot ones that were to be canned, surrounded a metal jug.
When the heat would get to be much, or the need for a refreshing drink of water be so desperate, the cook, the kids, Grandpa or Grandma would reach up, pull the dipper down, drop it into the jug, and refresh themselves once again.
Watching the sky unfold, the sun bearing down, the cicada or locusts playing their songs from the trees, and feeling the heat of the day can all be so real again, holding that porcelain dipper.
Ralph E Peck
Photo by Ralph Peck
Mountain View Oklahoma
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