To All The Kitchens I've Loved

I'm about to start the process of packing. My lease is up and I'm not one to renew. I don't like staying still, I wonder who I got that from. My whole life, my mom and I moved regularly. Sometimes, it was just down the street, and other times it was to another country. I always thought when I was younger, that I would graduate college, get an apartment, then never move ever again. Well, I was wrong. I've been in LA for 2 years now, had 2 apartments, and am ready to leave. Ants in my pants.

I never really miss the homes that we move from. I miss the memories and I miss the kitchens. I think 50% of my childhood was spent in the kitchen. We always sort of had a no rules type of kitchen. Everyone sat on the counters, meals were eaten standing up while talking on the phone and there usually was a TV in there too. I believe a TV in the kitchen is the ultimate sign that all is well.

My biggest complaint with our kitchens was that I always expected chocolate chip cookies to be taken out of the oven when I got home from school. There were never cookies in our home, my mom considered fruit a dessert. I think that's when I started looking into emancipation. 

Other than the lack of Nestle Tollhouse products, our kitchens take center stage on most of my positive memories. I think this is true for everyone though, no? It's where you discover new foods, learn how to cook and understand that the key to a organized fridge is "labels out." Or maybe most of my good memories involve food generally. 

The first kitchen I really remember was the kitchen at our beach cottage in Montecito, California. This was the house with the water tower. I know my mom spoke about this kitchen being her favorite too. This kitchen had a few makeovers during the years we lived there, but nothing ever major, as we were always renters, never buyers. The walls would change from white, to chocolate brown to at the very end, a collage of photos from floor to ceiling. The collage became a focal point, even if it wasn't meant that way. My mom originally just started taping a few things up every time she had printed a photo or purchased a post card. Then, a year later, there wasn't any wall left. People began to come over and ignore the initial pleasantries, they just wanted to find themselves on the wall. The kitchen was also the first room you would enter into from the front door, it pulled everyone in, particually due to the layout of the house, but also because it felt like the center of the world. My mom would host equally as caual dinner parties out on the lawn, accompanied by me, aggressively jumping on the trampoline and yelling, "Watch me do a flip!" My mom and I lived in this house for about 5 years, then returned to this house years later in 2011 until we moved to Paris. This is the only house I really ever refer to as home.

While we lived there, my grandmother lived in the Party house, a Shangrala escape at the top of a mountain. It wasn't the most conductive place to hold parties, because one drink in and you wouldn't be able to drive down the winding mountain. But this was the place that everyone gathered. The kitchen had dark wood walls, matching floors and windows that looked out over all of Santa Barbara all the way to the ocean. 

Since my mom was the most popular person in California in 2004, she of course had to throw a massive disco dance party here. I of course, had to wear my Heeleys and show off my new move, "the corkscrew delight." Something I made up that was equal parts "the running man" and disco thumbs. The parties my family threw were never adults only parties, if you had a kid, they were coming. So, I started bar tending to make some extra cash on the side.

This was the kitchen that I learned how to cook. Or watched my grandma cook and attempt to explain what she was doing, but instead was told to "watch out." She would create this huge meals for any occasion, it didn't have to be a holiday, it could just be a Wednesday.

My first kitchen I had on my own was in the Marais neighborhood of Paris. I had a sixth floor walk up studio, but I loved it. I had beautiful old wood floors and and it basically was just one big room, so there wasn't necessarily a separate kitchen. The kitchen was just part of the main room. Little known fact, France doesn't have garbage disposals because they are stupid. Not even a grain of rice can go down those drains, only no one ever told me that. I was under the impression that if it fit down the drain holes, it was ok. Nope. I came home from school one day to find that my sink was filled with water. Not sure how exactly that happened, but I wasn't about to call for help. So, wine glass by wine glass, I transported the water to the bathroom sink until the kitchen's was empty. I never used my kitchen sink again, It was pureply decorative for the last 6 months I lived there. A few months later in that same apartment, my heater caught on fire. Maybe it wasn't as great of an apartment as I remember.

Ok, so why am I describing all these kitchens? Well, because right now I hate mine. It's new and I'm the first person to ever use the fridge, which I like, but it could also be anyone else's kitchen. There's no personality, no warmth. No matter how many cookbooks and flowers I leave on the counter, the grey quartz just will never draw me in. There's nothing special about this kitchen. It looks like I just won a house on HGTV, but like the poor man's edition, none of that dream home giveaway shit. So, I started thinking. I don't like LA, I don't like my apartment, I don't really like the sunshine. Why am I here??? I couldn't think of a single reason to hold me to LA. But, I couldn't get it through my head that it was time to move. I was too stubborn, I was getting in the way of myself by trying to stick to my original plan, live in LA forever, leave the moving behind. I had created this mentality that I was not like my mother, that I wanted a steady and planned out life. I guess I thought that that simply meant not moving. 

Then, a few days ago I had a craving to go to a museum, but like a real museum...not a gallery. I wanted to see Michelangelo and Carvaggio and Delacroix. I didn't want to see a ironic piece of whatever in a white walled room. Sure, that's art to someone (a wrong someone), but not to me. I want to see something with history, something that wars were fought over. Ancient Greek busts. Larger than life Goddesses. Preserved Roman frescos. 

I realized that I wanted to get out of LA and everything it stood for. I hadn't seen open land in months. I had seen five girls from the Bachelor, but hadn't had a breath of fresh air. Honestly, I don't really want to breathe LA's air, have you seen the smog? I can very quickly decide I hate a place. I hated Paris during my last few months there, desperate to move to Los Angeles and live my dream life. But, here I am, 2 years later and convinced that I will never set foot in LA ever again (unless it's for the HUGE blockbuster movie I'm the star of and need to walk the red carpet so I don't come off as total diva.) Like when my mom declared Paris was stupid and she was moving to Provence, only to have their roles completely reversed 4 months later. The grass is always greener on the other side. 

So, Ty and I decided that we're moving to Paris. For three months. In October. I can't figure out how to get a Visa and David said he can't adopt me because I'm too old. Whatever, 3 months in Paris is perfect. It just makes sense. But first, I must apologize to Paris for all the mean things I've said to her. I'm sorry I called you stupid. I'm sorry I called your people stupid. I'm sorry I called the fact that you have to bag your own groceries stupid. I'm sorry that I called your non refrigerated milk stupid.I'm sorry that I called closing stores on Sunday stupid. I'm sorry that I called your one ice cub Coca Cola stupid. Actually, I take that one back, get more ice France! 

I now realize that Paris is perfect.

I want to walk along the streets and be surrounded by Haussman buildings instead of strip malls. I want to wander into the Louvre instead of an Albertsons. I want to sit and nurse one cup of coffee for 2 hours instead of taking everything to go. I'll probably be feeling differently once I'm there, but I won't know until I try. It'll be my first time living in Paris and doing what I love, the Have Some Decorum Sale.

I'm all in. I want to turn the shop into something really special, and to do that, I think I need to live in Paris, or at least be closer to it. I was looking through all my mom's photos of when we went to Paris for a month in 2006. My mom and grandma were there to buy all the pieces for their new shop Circa. Just look at this photos, you can't find this anywhere else but Paris.

If someone told me that I would be dying to go back to the Puces 10 years ago, I would thought I was on Punk'd. But, now it's all I can think about. My grandmother told me that I was quite lucky to be raised the way I was raised, that I might have hated being dragged along on Paris buying trips when I was a kid, but now, it's one of the memories I'm most thankful for. I love that I can tell the good blue and white from the bad, that I can figure out if a booth is a worth a second glance within 2 seconds, and whether or not that marble bust is gaudy or gorgeous. 

So, there's my plan. But who knows, I may change my mind by the time I post this and decide that I want a condo in Arizona, I'll be closer to Jodi Arias that way, and I've always wanted to know more about her.