Tonight is the last night with our old stove. Our Occidental Automatic ca. 1941. She has turned an obvious corner and become unsafe. She isn’t lighting, no longer holds consistent temperatures, burps tufts of gas, and her enamel between the 2nd and 3rd burners has cracked a good five inches.
I’m not surprised this day has come. Her inevitable decline has been happening gradually for a good year. To be fair, Dean found the old girl in the once-rundown Carriage House when he bought Annadel six years ago. But for as long as Dean and I have been in love, she’s been chugging and gurgling away. Keeping us warm and fed for more than 5 years now. And I am strikingly sad to see her retire tomorrow morning.
It was here on this old farm, in what is now our home here at Annadel Estate Winery, that I learned to cook on this funky stove. Before Pearl Harbor, before color TV, before women like me quit jobs for NASA to make wine and wear jeans and boots, before Julia Child was Julia Child for crying out loud… The Old GIrl has been heating and feeding her people. There is something so beautiful and familial in that continuity of nurturing. An earthly grace that to me transcends our particular time or even this particular family.
I want to write more. The 28 hours making of traditional Cassoulet springs to mind and how I fell asleep at the kitchen table half way through dinner. Or ‘perfecting’ Oatmeal Raisin cookies with Anni week after week trying to keep warm. But we’ve got a chicken to roast. And our son just filled his diaper… And candidly there’s too much to say to her. I know I am an idiot. She’s just a stove! An oven and four burners…2 of which don’t even work. But she is MY old stove. My Partner, besides Dean, in seeing me blossom from an ex-government, Cellar Girl to a happily hard-working artist wife and Mommy of two.
Dean promises to restore her for my birthday. But it may be a year or two. Until then I have to cook on a new spare stove that is so….modern. And aesthetically SO boring. But we have vines to plant, a winery to literally build, and two kids to feed, raise and school. I know tonight may not be our last dinner together but it feels like it. And I am going to miss her. Deeply.
I DO know though that I cannot bear to be here tomorrow morning at 9:00 AM when they come to move her. I am taking the kids for Pancakes at Rosemarie’s instead….