If you are a first time visitor to my apartment, the entire ground floor of a former bakery, your eyes will be slightly assaulted upon entering the front door. Aqua teal and sunflower yellow cabinets dominate the kitchen landscape. Depending on your state of sobriety, the paint was either sloppily or artistically sponged onto the wooden cabinets by an enthusiastic former tenant.
The first time I entered the apartment, after finding the rental listing online, I was mesmerized by those impudent colors. Maybe it was the overwhelming scent of pot, the rose bush I had to wrestle to get through the front door, the parrot sitting on a makeshift stand in the front living room, the blackberry vine climbing into the house through a window, or the patch of bamboo outback that my roommates and I would later lovingly refer to as “’Nam,” I was immediately sold on the house, hook, line, and sinker.
There are no right corners in our house. Ceilings slope, walls curve, floors dip. This makes hanging pictures, arranging furniture, and walking in a straight line quite difficult. Luckily those pastimes are not important to my housemates or me. Mod-podging cut-out body parts onto Christmas cards, making pancakes at midnight, and designing intricate personalities for our cats takes up most of our time.
When scrounging for free furniture for our hippie hovel, I found a black kitten with a crooked tail in the drawer of a yard sale dresser. After a slight moment of indecision, I threw responsibility out of my mold-covered window and took the kitty home. At eight weeks old, Behemoth – named after a rakish Russian literary feline – could fit into a coffee cup, an oven mitt, and many other household items just begging to hold a mewing bundle. Behemoth’s name was shortened overnight to B-bop and soon to just “B.” B now plays her part in the clockwork of our house. She sits in the dripping sink. She chews on the intruding vines. She stares at those hypnotizing cabinets.
Those bold colored cabinets provide us with culinary audacity- bison stuffed acorn squash sealed with gouda cheese, pancakes baked with yogurt and fruit in the middle, pumpkin beer bread, and red wine infused mushrooms. They also distract us. We forget to add the flour to our strawberry oatmeal bread. We boil out the alcohol in our rum-infused cider. We turn on the coffee pot without adding the water.
But despite any physical or olfactory discomfort, this house, unlike the room I sublet the previous summer, is a place I feel comfortable calling home. I’ve learned to ignore the layer of mold growing in my ever-dripping bathroom sink. I now deftly avoid getting caught on the thorns of our blossoming rose bush. I’ve taken to breathing through my mouth to avoid certain smells. And some days I don’t even give a second glance to the psychedelic hues of our cabinets.