AROUND
THE KITCHEN TABLE
By
Donald Ward
We’re coming up to
the second anniversary of Colleen’s stroke. She is slowly regaining
her language skills and teaching herself to read and write again. She
remains physically impaired, but she says that the constant pain on
her right side is a good thing because it means the muscles and nerves
are working in a part of her body that had once shut down.
Aside from these signs, I
know Colleen is getting better because she’s started to rearrange
things. I came back from my weekly stay at the abbey to find that she
had cleaned out my closet. Some of the items I hadn’t worn in
years, while others I hadn’t worn at all.
Among the latter was a beautiful
summer-weight suit that she gave me for Christmas the year before she
got sick. It was too light-weight for winter, and when summer came that
year I had other things on my mind. The suit, now two-and-a-half years
old, still has the tags on it, but it fits perfectly.
A more troubling aspect of
Colleen’s continued healing was her recent decision that we should
switch our home offices. Hers was too large, she said, and she knew
I was bothered by the sun streaming in the south window when I was trying
to work at my computer. I thought this was a gesture of pure generosity,
until it struck me that the chimney goes up the south wall of the house,
directly through Colleen’s new room.
The story of the chimney,
like the suit, goes back to before Colleen was sick. The chimney has
been unnecessary ever since we had a high-efficiency furnace installed.
I once expressed a vague interest in having it knocked out to gain a
little extra room in the kitchen.
Vague plans in my mind tend
to solidify in Colleen’s, and soon she was making plans. I resisted
at first because the possibility of plunging from a steeply pitched
roof to a painful death did not appeal to me. I didn’t know how
to remove a chimney and I didn’t know anyone who did.
I did, however, think we
could install a new counter and sink to tide us over until we had figured
out what to do about the chimney. I knew I was taking a risk in suggesting
it, but the old counter really was a wreck and the sink had started
rising from its moorings like a boat in restive seas. 
When Colleen went out to
price counters and sinks she was amazed at how inexpensively we could
replace ours.
“I know,” I said.
“That’s why I suggested it.”
Then one evening she came
into the kitchen and said, “If we’re going to put in a new
counter and sink we might as well put cabinets on the opposite wall.”
“That wasn’t
what we decided,” I said.
“We might as well,” she said, and the next day she went in search of cabinets.
She found a deal: two companies were merging and selling off the stock
that they wouldn’t be manufacturing any longer. The style was
exactly what we wanted, and almost 50 per cent off, but we had to act
quickly because it wasn’t going to be available in a couple of
weeks.
Within two weeks of my suggesting that we replace the counter and sink,
we had bought an entire kitchen — except, oddly enough, for a
counter and sink. The cabinets are in packing crates in the garage,
along with a dishwasher. We can’t install them until we get rid
of the chimney, and in two years I haven’t found anyone willing
to do that. More importantly, I haven’t been willing to invite
a demolition crew into the high-stress zone that houses become when
one of the family is critically ill.
The counter is still a wreck and the sink is listing more drunkenly
than ever, but now that Colleen is in possession of one of the rooms
the chimney passes through, I know it’s a only a matter of time
before she has taken command of all of them. She is a person who gets
things done, and a mere ruptured aneurysm isn’t going to slow
her down for long.
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