Farm House Part II: Kitchen - Our Mother's Dream

Ever since I could remember, my Mother would say that someday she wanted to tear the wall out between the kitchen and the summer kitchen, enlarge the kitchen and remodel. It was her dream. It was the only dream I ever heard her talk about in regard to the house. I think this is because my Mother was always in the kitchen, cooking, cooking and cooking! With 6 mouths to feed and a hungry farmer, you can understand that the kitchen was her main focus. There was never any money to see such a dream come true in my growing up years.

However, the time did come; I believe it was in the early 80’s that Mom saw her dream realized. Her Mother passed away, and between the small inheritance she received from Grandma and a second mortgage on the farm, those walls did get torn down, the kitchen was enlarged, and Mom got her beautiful new kitchen. I thought it interesting, that they built an addition at the same time to make another “summer” kitchen. The wood stove went into the summer kitchen, along with the deep freeze, the old kitchen cupboards and a stainless steel sink. The idea was so that when she would do canning in the summer and cut up meat from butchering, that they could have the summer kitchen for those activities, and save the mess from the main kitchen. It was a good to have the outer "summer" kitchen.

They put a beautiful stone fireplace with a mantel in the new kitchen/family room. It had an insert for wood burning, again, to save on heating costs of the oil furnace. The year the kitchen was finished, us kids went together at Christmas and bought a “grandfather” clock for the mantel. The kitchen was big, so that our old fashioned large wood kitchen table that was handed down from Mom’s Mother (Grandma G.) would fit in, along with a large “work island”. Our brother Tim inherited the table. Mom finally had more cupboards, a good working kitchen, even a dishwasher, and lots of space. On the side of the kitchen that had the fireplace, they placed a loveseat and some other furniture that used to be Grandma G’s. So, in addition to the kitchen they had a lovely family room. What a difference from the old kitchen.

Our Grandma G. (Mom’s Mother), was an excellent homemaker, and kept her house perfect all the time. She would often come down and spend a morning or afternoon helping my Mother clean the kitchen. She would enlist my help, and then after everything in the kitchen was spic and span, she would say to me “Now, Linda, we have this cleaned well, you must help your Mother to keep it this way”. Mom was always so busy with working part time at the Dr.’s office, raising us 6 kids and helping Dad on the farm. She milked the cows, gathered the eggs, did all the egg washing (there was a machine that we put a basket of eggs in, sort of like a dishwasher, one basket at a time), and she graded all the eggs on the machine we called “the egg grader”, it weighed each egg one at a time, so they could be packed in the proper size cartons. She always had a breakfast, lunch and supper for all of us, no matter how busy she was. Meal time, feeding her family, was the number one priority my Mother had. With cooking and all of these chores, it was difficult for her to keep up on cleaning the house. Us kids were supposed to help keep it neat, but you know how kids are. It was my job to help keep the house clean, but again, as a kid, sometimes I cleaned well, other times I didn’t. I always washed the dishes, guess that was the thing that I thought was the most important. Once in a while, I’d get ambitious and clean off a counter, or some other sort of cleaning. Not having the house neat and as clean as she thought it should be drove my Grandma G. crazy, which is why she would often come down to help out. But, while it drove Grandma crazy, it didn’t make Mom crazy. She knew she had too many other things to do that were more important. If I knew company was coming, I’d scurry around and clean then…and I’d get nervous about what people might think…but not Mom. Her famous saying was “They are coming to see us, not the house”, another saying was “we live in our house, it’s not meant to be a show case.” Mother and Dad were never ones that tried to “impress” anyone or worried about what other people thought!

My three younger siblings were in junior and senior high when the addition and kitchen was built, us three older ones, were gone from home and grown up. We used to always comment how nice it would have been if Mom’s dream had happened when all six of us were there. She never said that though, because she was so grateful to finally see her dream realized. One thing she did regret though, was that her Mother was not there to see her new kitchen. We always commented how happy Grandma G. would have been for Mother. And we were all grateful that it was because of Grandma G. that it became a reality. We like to think though, that Grandma G. (Gochnauer) did know!