Grandma's Hoosier Cupboard

                                                                 

Mine, when in my shop

Looks just like mine but I don't have it anymore!

A showroom-new cupboard is flawless, but it could never make me swoon the way my Grandma's Hoosier did.

Now, lest your imagination fancies you with visions of golden-aged oak, roll-top breadbox and classic built-in flour sifter, I must enlighten you to the modesty of Grandma Rosa's Hoosier. Her cupboard, in her California home in the fifties, was made from humble pine, painted creamy white.  Its essential purpose in life was to store food and kitchen items, and this it did for many years, to my never-failing (?) enchanted memory.

It was the imprint of these recollections that induced me to eventually bring such a one home for myself, decades later to our Wisconsin farmhouse.

We came upon our find in a dank shed adjacent to a rural antique store several miles from home. The shed was used for overflow of bigger items the main building could not house, with "weathering" continually seeping in at all sides, underneath and from up above.

We didn't snatch it up right away. In fact, we passed on it several times. Despite its banishment to a near-dungeon, it was a slightly bigger-ticket item, and our pocketbook was more in line with the smaller dishware in the shop.

After about a year of frequenting this shop, we at last rescued the cupboard from icy winters and sweltering summers. A little worse the wear from the elements, we scrubbed up the warped wood and gave it a fresh coat of paint, then slid it into our farmhouse kitchen.

We backed up the Hoosier against a longish wall and set our aged oak table in front, and went industriously  to work stocking it, filling it generously with jars of flour, sugar, and other staples.

I used a fine, wide drawer for rolling pins and cookie cutters and all manner of old but perfectly useful kitchen utensils. The smaller drawers were prime for dishtowels and cloths, and a deep tin-lined bin was ideal for airy bags of potato chips. Behind its sizable bottom door my bigger stockpots and gangly bake-ware found perfect housing.

I loved the look of that Hoosier in my kitchen. It was homey and functional--and put me back in time to my grandma's kitchen.

My grandma's Hoosier was recessed under overhead built-in cupboards in her narrow but generous kitchen.

It too was painted white, with no fancy adornments. Early each morning Grandma would unwrap a fresh stick of butter from her refrigerator, and set it in a butter dish on the enamel work surface of the Hoosier. Whenever we grandchildren spent the night with her, we could count on sweet butter that cut and spread easily onto our toast, or sliced cleanly to sizzle in a frying pan for our breakfast eggs.

Grandma's cupboard too was full of purpose. It sheltered her everyday dishes up top and always had a loaf of fresh bread in its cubbyhole middle. The work surface was made for putting together sandwiches, or for slathering preserves onto warm tortillas. It was also a good place for holding dishes from the front eating room as they awaited their turn at the sink.

Whenever I used my Hoosier, it never failed to spur me into further musings tied to Grandma.

My own mother would tell you that Grandma was forever stern, fault-finding and hard to know. (Perhaps this was part and parcel of many a mother-in-law and daughter-in-law relationship.) My own personal experience told me otherwise. At Grandma's house there was always a game of Chinese Checkers ready to go, and cousins to meander her small acreage with. For me, her steady presence was unobtrusive but yet warming all at once. 

It really was Grandma's kitchen and her humble Hoosier cupboard that bespoke best the connectedness she felt with you. Her little stocked pantry filled with nurturing foods told you this. Her invitation for you to generously help yourself made her welcoming to you ever so implicit.

In time Grandma would move into a newer house in a nearby town, replete with a good plenty of built-in cupboards. She didn't take the Hoosier with her, and not too long afterward I heard the old house was being razed, as they say, to put in a parking lot. I didn't nurture impractical thoughts of tracking down that cupboard; in fact I hardly remembered it at all then.

It was really only when I saw the neglected Hoosier in the dank shed in Wisconsin that Grandma's kitchen came so alive to me again. Seeing it stirred all the old images, such that I determined images like that should transpire in our farmhouse kitchen for our own children.

And so it did. For myself, I could never go near the thing without wanting to draw up a chair and pour out a cup of fresh coffee. Sometimes I would sit to heavily lace my cup with rich cream and sugar, and slurp just a little noisily, the way Grandmas always did. A new and perfect cupboard would never incite this urge in me!

One year, I decided to move my Hoosier to a soup and sandwich shop I had opened in the small town near our home. My "kids" then had flown the nest, and it was just the thing the place needed to beckon customers over to its side, where they naturally pulled up a chair to cozily sit for a light lunch.

Their explanation as to why this was the corner most often chosen always touched on the very simple and almost universal: it reminded them of their Grandma's kitchen.

After about thirteen years, I closed that shop and made the reluctant move to sell the Hoosier. My home kitchen had been changed up so much there didn't seem a place for it anymore.  I did not resign the piece to another stretch of loneliness, however. Another couple considered it a delightful nostalgic find and told me they would be enjoying it in a little private cabin they have created away from the main house on their rural property.  They go there for peace and seclusion they say, from all the commotion that occurs even in this "quieter" neck of the rush-rush world.

An object is just an object, but is it? If the use of it traverses the generations and its very presence is evocative of the most pleasant remembrances a person could ever hope to recreate, it IS something more, isn't it?