A kitchen in August

The kitchen faces west, which is a design decision somebody made in 1961 and which I think about every summer evening between six and eight.

We have one fan and it only works on the high setting, so it's either a gale or nothing. It's a gale. It knocks the recipe card off the counter roughly every four minutes and neither of us has moved the recipe card.

Peaches this week — the good ones, the ones you have to eat standing over the sink. The radio was on but too quiet to actually follow, which is the correct volume for a radio.

Most of what I want to remember is like this. Nothing happened.

By eight the light gets low enough to come straight down the length of the counter and everything in its way turns gold for about fifteen minutes. Then it's gone and it's just a kitchen again, and we do the dishes.

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