Thoughts from the Summer Kitchen

To cook or not to cook; that is the question. Whether it is better to turn on the oven and heat the house even more or eat peanut butter sandwiches for the rest of the week.

It is not nearly so eloquent as Shakespeare’s soliloquy in Hamlet, is it? Nor is it likely to last for 400 years and more, stimulating the philosophical imagination of millions of people. No, it is just the question we face on these hot summer days. For those with air conditioning, the question may seem even more significant as we pay to cool the house and then deliberately set one appliance working against another!

Many years ago when I was a youth, farms had no air conditioning but some had summer kitchens to solve this dilemma. This was a room on the back of the house, or sometimes a separate building with the capacity to prepare meals or do the home canning without heating up the main house. There would be some kind of big stove (wood fired in the era of my childhood), and at least one big table on which to prepare the food to be cooked. In some climates, it may have been a room with less than four walls, which would not keep out the flies, but would at least allow in any passing breeze.

Whatever happened to summer kitchens? Did urban dwellers ever have such things? Did they just become too expensive, too luxurious for the modern world? Did the era of the supermarket and fresh produce all year round supersede the need for such a device?

I stand in my kitchen and idly ponder this question of no importance at all, then glance out the window to my back porch where my eye falls on what I realize is probably the modern equivalent: the bar-b-que! Talk about miniaturization; a whole room has been replaced by a fairly small device! Of course you are unlikely to can your peaches in the bar-b-que, but most of us don’t do that any more anyway, do we? We simply store all those sealers in the cold room in case we ever decide to try it again. Mostly we just cook frozen hamburgers and hotdogs. Oh there are persons who are really industrious who try some more exotic creations in the name of keeping the house cool; my wife once baked rhubarb crisp in there, but mostly we don’t, do we?

All of this means nothing at all that I can think of, and that is exactly the point. Every one of us need time, once in a while, to contemplate what are merely the musings that get caught in an idle mind. It all rather reminds me of Eeyore in A. A. Milne’s The House at Pooh Corner;

They haven't got Brains, any of them, only grey fluff that's blown into their heads by mistake.

How delightful! No wonder I love Pooh so much.

I hope you are enjoying your summer, and blessed with time for some idle musings of your own.

Posted by Carman

Early

Well ladies and gentlemen, I'm about to leave early. As Peter Trueman used to say "this isn't news, but it's reality."

I'm trying to do more of that lately. I'm making an effort, as I reported to the rest of my team at staff meeting this week, to disconnect. I'm working at taking the time off that I have coming. In this job we work lots of overtime. Or at least if we were in a regular job it would be counted as overtime.

Have you ever considered that there are really only about 50 weekends in a year that one could reasonably be in a Sunday congregational gathering? And that most of your CEM team tend to work those days! (I'm giving us a conservative two weeks holiday; because, believe it or not, reunion, youth camp, directors' retreat, even women's retreat) do not count as holidays. Even if you're not officially "on staff" because there's always someone who needs to talk, or ask questions or give you some feedback on something you talked about last time. Now don't think we don't enjoy all that--or most of it anyway, but it isn't exactly leisure.

This is not to say either that we only work weekends! Much stuff gets packed into "office hours" even if those hours are spent on the road, at a home office, meeting with people, attending workshops or meetings or information sessions or preparing to preach, teach, counsel... There's plenty to do.

So here's the scoop. Sometime in the year 2011 I DO plan to retire--not come in to work any more. And I need to practise not being here, not staying until the last person leaves, not waiting to see if there's something more to do, someone else to call. I need quite a lot of practice, alas. It might take several months. But for today, I think I'll just leave early. Is everybody OK with that?

Posted by Marion