🌿 While the World Changed, the Kitchen Stayed Familiar
The other day, Zach and I were watching the movie 9 to 5. The secretaries were sitting at their desks using electric typewriters, and I found myself explaining to him that this was exactly how I started working.
And then I remembered carbon paper. 😆
If you made a mistake on a four-part bill of lading, correcting it was practically an art form. You had to line all those copies back up in the typewriter perfectly so the corrected letter or number didn’t end up too high, too low, or sitting off to one side.
There was no backspace button that magically made everything disappear. 😂
Even after computers began appearing in offices, the workplace was still noisy. Phones rang constantly. Customers called in orders. People talked across desks. Filing cabinet drawers opened and closed all day long.
Then I left the workforce for a number of years while my children were young.
When I eventually returned, I couldn’t believe how much had changed.
The office was almost silent.
Orders that once came over the telephone now arrived electronically. You reviewed them, completed them and sent them on their way without ever speaking to the customer. Filing cabinets were disappearing. Paper was disappearing. So many things that had once seemed like permanent parts of working life were simply gone.
And recently it occurred to me how different that is from another room where I’ve spent a great deal of my life.
My kitchen.
I walk into my kitchen today and find my cast-iron pans. My casserole dishes. Mixing bowls and measuring cups. Wooden spoons. Pots and pans. And my Colletti stovetop coffee pot quietly making coffee much the way coffee has been made for generations.
Of course, kitchens have changed too. We have microwaves, toaster ovens, food processors, air fryers and all sorts of wonderful conveniences.
But somehow, most of those things didn’t replace the old tools.
They simply joined them.
Perhaps the biggest change has been the way we find our recipes. Once we opened a cookbook, pulled a handwritten card from a recipe box or clipped something from the newspaper. Today we can find a recipe on our phones—or even ask artificial intelligence to help us create one.
And then we put down the phone and pick up the wooden spoon.
They have always said that the kitchen is the heart of the home.
Maybe one reason that remains so true for me is that when I walk into my kitchen, I am surrounded by familiar things that have hardly changed at all.
The world outside that room has changed enormously during my lifetime. The way we work, communicate, shop and find information would have been almost unimaginable to the young woman sitting behind that electric typewriter.
But there is peace in walking into my kitchen and finding so much that is familiar.
I can pick up a cast-iron skillet, take a casserole dish from the cupboard, put the coffee pot on the stove and do something much the same way generations before me did.
Maybe that’s part of what makes a kitchen the heart of a home.
It isn’t simply where we prepare our food.
It’s one of the places where the past and the present are allowed to live comfortably together.
We can welcome the new, keep what was good about the old, and somehow make room for both.
And at the end of the day, no matter how much the world changes, there is still something wonderfully familiar about putting supper on the table and calling the people you love to come eat.
The world changed. Somehow, wonderfully, the kitchen stayed familiar. 🌿💛🏡
Helene
Rosemary Thyme 🌿😊
Fall in Love with Home Again 💛🏡
