Dystopia envy

My weapon would be the spatula.

Owen and I saw The Hunger Games yesterday and loved it, but afterwards I felt strangely blue. I say "strangely" because I was not feeling sorry for the district kids who have to run around the forest murdering each other to save their own lives, but sorry for myself because I never do anything urgent or athletic or noble involving arrows or wasps or homicide. The biggest challenges of the weekend involved remembering the password to our credit card account and describing the vistas of Big Sur without using the word "majestic."*

When we got back from the movie I started cleaning the kitchen, which was probably not the right move, but the other day I read that Elizabeth David's kitchen was a room of "orderly clutter." That is exactly the kind of kitchen I want! And I've already achieved the clutter, so, halfway there.

I'll just fast-forward through the first hour of cleaning until I to got to the spatulas, which were the exciting part. Okay, the "exciting" part.

I had six spatulas, only one of which I actually purchased, sometime around 1990. I needed to put one spatula in the Goodwill box in order to achieve "orderly clutter." But which spatula?

You see why I might want to be reaped?

It turns out that my favorites are the two little jankety-looking old spatulas with the thin, rusting, flexible heads and the black plastic handles. These are the vintage spatulas that came down from the kitchens of my mother and grandmother and they are very precise and light and while the handles of both are gnarled from accidental melting episodes, they are my top-rated spatulas by far and not for sentimental reasons. They are simply the finest tools.

much used

I basically hate the stainless steel spatulas because they are heavy and stiff -- more like bludgeons than delicate implements for manipulating fried eggs -- and the handles get very hot.  As a people, we really went overboard with the stainless steel in the '90s and '00s. But even worse than the stainless steel spatulas: the plastic-headed spatula. It is thick and dull and you feel like you're flipping pancakes with a spoon. Sound the cannon for the plastic-headed spatula.

Takeaway from all this? Some things have gotten better in the last 40 years, like cars, which use less fuel, spew less pollution, and are generally safer for human use. Some things have gotten worse, like spatulas.

Oh, I was in such a crabby mood after The Hunger Games.

security potholder

I still couldn't throw away anything associated with my mother, like the quilted potholders she sewed from old sundresses or the vintage peanut butter jar filled with rock salt from the time we made ice cream circa 1975. I will have to incorporate that Skippy jar into orderly clutter.

the weirdest, most useless item in our kitchen

Speaking of my lovely mother, today is the second anniversary of her death. She's never far from my thoughts but I will say that the second anniversary finds her older daughter in much better mental condition than did the first.

Real life is actually full of terrible, lonely challenges. For the most part they don't involve arrows, genetically altered wasps or running very, very fast. Sometimes I wish they did.

the very last picture I ever took of her

*not written into the contract; personal challenge