yellow formica

I am sitting at the kitchen counter writing an email, and I just had an unbelievably massive flashback. From where I am sitting the TV in the sitting room area is reflected in a window that provides a perfect (well, reversed but otherwise perfect) view of the screen. Its funny how much has changed around me, and yet that tiny and fairly useless ability has remained a constant.

Well, back in the day it wasn't so useless. Lets just take a walk down memory lane, shall we? Back in the day was about, oh sayyyy, 12 years ago. So, back then I was ten we had lived in our house for about two or three years. Back in the days even before that the house had been owned by a family that consisted of two doctors and their four children, and their terrible taste in shag carpet. Needless to say the brown and orange shag left the same day as the doctors, along with their top to bottom fridge full's worth of Ukrops prepared foods. Within a matter of weeks my mother's exemplary taste had already begun to transform the house, but some remnants of the old regime remained longer than she probably would have wished. In particular I am referring to the kitchen (and to the awful blue carpet that stayed in my room until I was about 16, which I am still petulant over). Whoever designed said kitchen decided it would be a good idea to plaster the room in yellow formica and laminate flooring. Ich. The kitchen was essentially a yellow cubicle attached to a huge glassed in porch that had the same aforementioned blue carpet. This porch was our schoolroom, as "back in the day" was when we were all home schooled. That room, while we are on the subject, was wondrous. We had one of those short tables with the mini chairs, our own cubbies, and a drawer full of dry erase markers which we were constantly using to coat the windows with solar systems and diagrams and doodles and occasionally a dreaded math problem or two, as well as a TV which probably had no idea there were shows that weren't Bill Nye the Science Guy or Wishbone (TGIF? What's that!?).

Well in the spirit of honesty, back in the day I occasionally provoked a bit of deserved punishment from my teacher (or in really dire cases Principal Carter) and back in the day one of the ways we learned our lessons was by being deprived of our dose of Magic School Bus. Trust me, it was a fatal blow. What Momma Carter didn't realize was that if you sat juuuuust right on the counter in the kitchen you could see the reflection of the TV through the window between the kitchen and the porch superbly.

Okay, she probably did realize.

Either way tonight I was sitting at the bar in our long since renovated kitchen and my sister switched on the TV. I caught sight of whatever it was and was immediately whooshed back into my childhood (despite the fact that it wasn't even PBS on the screen). For everything in the structure of our house, not to mention in my life, that has shifted and changed - I might as well have been sitting on that counter with my bowl cut bangs and mismatched jelly sandals pretending to read the Boxcar Children while sneaking in an episode of Zoom I was supposed to be missing (probably as a result of my insistence that even if that is the right way you do long division its not how I do it). It was a rather soothing moment given all the changes that are coming up in my life over the next year. And yes, 'whooshed' is the technical term for such an experience.