An Inventory of the Kitchen

I had meant to sit in the garden. The garden was four steps beyond the back door and I never made it, because on the way past the counter I looked at a spoon.

Eleven things

The counter held eleven objects. I know because I counted them early, before the counting became difficult, and I wrote the number on the back of an envelope in handwriting I later found legible, which surprised me.

• a spoon
• a jar of coffee, half
• a second jar, empty, kept for reasons
• a chopping board with a scorch mark
• a bowl of three lemons
• a radio, off
• a tea towel, folded
• a bottle of oil
• a salt pig
• a key that opens nothing in this house
• a glass of water, mine

That is the whole inventory. I mention it because for the next six hours it was the entire world, and eleven felt, at the time, like an enormous number of things to be responsible for.

The spoon has no floor

Here is what I mean. You look at a spoon and you see a spoon — that is one act, and it takes no time, and it is finished. But if you keep looking, the spoon does not stay finished. It becomes a curve, and the curve becomes a specific curve, with a place where it changes its mind about how fast to bend. There is a ridge along the handle that I had run my thumb over some thousands of times and had never once met. Where the bowl joins the stem there is a thickening, and the thickening has a purpose, and the purpose belongs to somebody who thought about it, probably a long time ago, probably at length.

None of this is hallucination. This is the trouble with describing it. Every observation I made about the spoon that afternoon was true and would survive being checked. What had changed was that the descriptions did not stop. Ordinarily attention hits a floor: you get to spoon, the floor holds, you go and sit in the garden. That afternoon the floor was not there. I went down through spoon into curve, into ridge, into intention, into the person, into the fact that the person is almost certainly dead and the spoon is not, and by then I had been at the counter long enough that the light on the chopping board had moved the width of the scorch mark.

The lemons were worse

Three lemons in a bowl. I could describe the lemons for the length of this piece and I am going to spare us both, but I want to record one thing, which is the pores. A lemon’s skin is a field of small pits, and they are not arranged, and the not-arrangement is not random either — it has the quality of something that grew into its own logic without ever writing the logic down. I looked at that surface for a long time and had the clear thought, arriving fully formed: nobody has checked this. Not this lemon specifically. This texture. The full detail of it, on every lemon, has mostly gone unwitnessed, and it is going to keep doing that, and it does not need me.

That thought has a family resemblance to the one I had on the sea wall at Weldenmouth, and I have noticed it turns up whenever the floor goes.

Six hours

I know it was six because the radio was off the whole time and the light did what the light does in January, which is leave early. At some point I drank the glass of water and it was the most straightforwardly good thing that happened, and I remember thinking that water is the only object on the counter that does not have a surface to fall into.

I did not get to the garden. I did, near the end, pick up the key that opens nothing, and put it down again, which felt like an enormous administrative achievement.

What was left

The next day the kitchen was a kitchen. Eleven objects, all of them shut again, each one taking the correct fraction of a second to identify and dismiss. I was relieved. I want to be honest that I was relieved — the shut version is livable and the open version is not, and anyone who tells you they would prefer to see the lemon in full at all times has not tried it for six hours on a Tuesday.

But I have kept the envelope. And I still cannot use that spoon without noticing the ridge.