Before Jim and I moved to Linda’s Last Chance Ranch, we rented a
tiny apartment in San Juan Bautista with a kitchen so small,
without moving from the center of the kitchen, I could cook a meal,
do the dishes and put the milk away.
Like most couples, we could not wait to have our own kitchen,
one that would be spacious and designed for easy access.
As a result of our ideas, we have a great big 24
square-foot-by-12-foot kitchen, but with a broken ankle, it might
as well be one square mile.
Before Jim and I moved to Linda’s Last Chance Ranch, we rented a tiny apartment in San Juan Bautista with a kitchen so small, without moving from the center of the kitchen, I could cook a meal, do the dishes and put the milk away.
Like most couples, we could not wait to have our own kitchen, one that would be spacious and designed for easy access.
As a result of our ideas, we have a great big 24 square-foot-by-12-foot kitchen, but with a broken ankle, it might as well be one square mile.
Hobble-hobble, shuffle-shuffle toting a Ziploc bag of mashed potatoes with my mouth, I drop the bag on the table and declared “breakfast” is served.
Getting dressed every morning is minimal, but functional. I throw on a pair of polypropylene sweats and a robe with deep pockets to carry stuff, particularly food! Each pocket filled with survival goods, the portable phone, a pen, notebook, a bottle of water, an orange and assortment of self-opening food containers.
A trip to the kitchen is well thought-out because the last thing I want to do is find out I forgot something and have to go back.
Today’s lunch is a can of sardines and a bag of crackers.
OK, a few pounds I could afford to lose, but hey, I am burning more calories than I am taking in. I feel like saying, “Enough is enough, someone please get me a cheeseburger and fries – I need my Trans fat.”
Oh, how I long to stand on my own two feet, staring into a refrigerator full of food until the light bulb burned out.
I have no clue what is in my icebox or what experiment lays hidden, rotting in some undisclosed container since Jim started food shopping.
And, why does he keep asking me “what’s for dinner?” Cooking on crutches should be a spectator sport. Go figure, it takes two hands to hold a walker and two hands to carry a pot of water. What I end up doing is making six trips from the sink to the stove carrying water bottles in my pockets to fill the pot for tonight’s dinner, corned beef and cabbage. One-pot meals I can do, as long as I don’t have to keep coming back to stir the pot.
Too tired to make a half a dozen more trips from the table to the stove I start tossing the potatoes, carrots and onions into the pot. Vegetables plopping and dropping into a pot were beginning to make waves and spill over.
I tossed a bag of salad across the room and hope it lands on the kitchen table; it does, narrowly missing the top of Jim’s head. Pulling out his notepad, he said, “That’s it – I get the hint” jotting down “bell and basket” for walker.
The look in my loved one’s eyes tell me to be grateful that I wasn’t born a horse or he would have to put me out of my misery and shoot me.
Carrying my own weight is one helluva workout. With all this upper body exercise, I just might pass the pencil test.
Oh yes, the ranch kitchen is a far cry from our itty-bitty apartment kitchen in San Juan Bautista, but at least I wouldn’t be dead tired and hungry at the end of the day. I grabbed a yogurt, put it in my pocket carried it to the bedroom then remembered – I forgot a spoon.
Linda Lee King is a correspondent with the Free Lance. Her column runs on Wednesdays.
