Dinner was a simple plate of buttered toast and scrambled eggs. Breakfast food, I know. But I love eating breakfast foods at night and dinner foods in the morning. Many’s the time I’ve eaten hamburgers for breakfast. It used to drive Hamp crazy. When we first got married, I tried to ‘eat normally,’ as Hamp put it. But I couldn’t keep it up. Habits ingrained since college, now some ten years hence, just didn’t fade that easily. After a while Hamp gave up and accepted me the way I was. That he could do that was one of the many good things about him, the real good things.
As often happened when I sat in the kitchen, my gaze went to the wall cabinet. It was a big family kitchen, just the kind Hamp and I wanted and hoped we’d need for all the children we planned to have. The house was only about thirty years old and basically in excellent condition. But for some reason, the kitchen had only one cabinet. It was wide and deep, but tilted. The nails holding it at the top had worked loose or maybe they were never well drilled to begin with. As a result, the top of the cabinet leaned forward. I could put dishes and glasses to the very back of the shelves, but I couldn’t take a chance on putting in much and certainly nothing expensive, including the fine china Hamp’s mother left us.
Hamp had promised to fix the cabinet and to put up more. I know he would’ve done it, if he hadn’t died. It wasn’t a promise he broke, but one he couldn’t keep. His leather tool kit still lay open on the countertop under the cabinet, just the way he left it. I’d never put it away. Someday, I was going to fix that cabinet myself.
Someday.