Women in the Kitchen

Daily writing prompt

Who are your favorite people to be around?

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Women in the kitchen.

More specifically, women in the kitchen who are stirring the soup or shredding the carrots or opining about the doneness of the roast. Or in another iteration, women in the kitchen who are packaging meals for people who are homeless.

Last week, a Street Angels team of four of us assembled 140 meals, each with two pulled pork sliders with coleslaw and a pickle, fruit cups and cookies on the side. I slung the coleslaw, picked each pickle, and put the lids on about a hundred meal containers. We worked fast – so the first meals didn’t get cold while the last meals got assembled.

So, what’s to like? Women who are all about doing the job. Women who see what needs to be done and do it. Women who’ll open twenty cans of fruit cocktail with a hand can opener and then count out 140 little containers and fill each one just so. And then, I love this, pick out the one peeled grape in the big bowl of fruit cocktail that has a bit of a blemish and toss it across the room into the trash. Everybody’s thinking about that one guy who will get that bad grape.

I love being there. I love the tasks, the banter, the other women. I love that one woman wore a very thick, quilted apron that her mother made for her. I knew that when I saw the apron but asked about her apron anyway. It made me miss my mother and her aprons and wonder if she’d ever made me an apron and I left it somewhere in my life. I can’t remember but I wish she had and that I still had it to wear to the Street Angels kitchen.

Being in the kitchen with women makes you miss your mother and your aunts and your sisters but makes you glad at the same time. You had that time and you know what it means.