I remember a kitchen.

It was a big, plain kitchen with a long, plain table. Cupboards lined one of the yellow walls. It was a pale, watered-down yellow that faded into the yellow linoleum. An old black stove with a shelf along the back stood stoutly along one wall, with a percolator of coffee on one burner, the gas flame flickering underneath.

It was a kitchen that would never win likes on Instagram. But there was a feeling in that kitchen that no perfectly staged picture could ever capture.

The checkered green vinyl tablecloth was tacky with summer heat under my sun-burned arms. The old hobnail coffee mug, filled with sugared milk and a splash of coffee, was cool in my hands. The yeast aroma of freshly baked maple nut coffee cake filled the air, along with fresh brewed coffee and familiar voices. All talking at once. These sisters – my aunts – and their elderly mother.

In that moment I belonged.

Is it only childhood’s innocence that I’m remembering? We often over-sentimentalize the past. The bad times fade in our memory, and the highlights remain. This family had its bad times, its petty arguments, its old resentments. But in that moment of togetherness, the food and the coffee brought with it talk and laugher, and soothed the raw edges. It brought them together, these women.

“After a good dinner
one can forgive anybody,
even one’s own relatives.”
-Oscar Wilde

Togetherness and Connection

I found an old cookbook at a yard sale one day and picked it up on a whim. The Cooking of Germany, by Nika Standen Hazelton, was so much more than just a cookbook. It was a deep look into a culture that fascinates me. Perhaps it’s my own German roots, but I found myself drawn to the centuries-old history of this cuisine. To the simplicity and stoutness of it. And I noticed it again. Along with the food, and the recipes, and the stories, there drifted a feeling.

The German word for it is gemütlichkeit.

There’s no English word that directly translates. In an attempt to describe it, I find the words warmth, friendliness, and good cheer. Coziness. Peace of mind.

Perhaps it can be compared to the popular Danish word, hygge. But hygge has become an over-used brand. In typical American fashion, we’ve polished it up like the piles of plastic apples in the supermarket, selling this perfect version of “hygge”, and making us feel that in order to find this coziness and connection, we need the perfectly neutral throw pillows and white sofas and rattan baskets and books with perfectly coordinated bindings lying on the perfectly weathered white end table.

The Instagram worthy picture. And a bevy of Instagram-worthy friends to match, equally coordinated.

I love beauty and calming aesthetics. But this goes so much deeper than beauty.

The root of both of these words holds a feeling of connection. A togetherness that is most often found in undocumented gatherings, in simple food, with people that welcome us into their everyday living. It’s a sense of belonging, deep in our hearts and minds, despite imperfection.

Food is a language that transcends culture.

“Food is everything we are.
It’s an extension of nationalist feeling,
ethnic feeling,
your personal history,
your province, your region, your tribe,
your grandma.”
-Anthony Bourdain

There’s a chapter in this cookbook titled A Time to Make Wine and Make Merry. The author writes, “Autumn is the season for harvesting grapes and making wine, and then for celebrating a hard task well done. Fall festivals, deriving from immemorial tradition, are held to pay homage to wine.” Those were years when neighbors gathered, to help with the work, and to celebrate the harvest. She writes, “after the butchering was completed, and the Wurst made, the family and the neighbors got together for a Schlachtfest, a convivial meal at which they sampled the freshly made Wurst.”

She speaks of the ritual of the handschlag, translated literally as a strike of hands, to seal the bargain between a buyer and seller. There is a picture, and it always makes me smile. The grins on the faces and the open camaraderie in the eyes of the two bargainers, while observers look on with sober interest.

It’s hygge. Gemütlichkeit. Connection and a sense of place. Grandma’s kitchen with all the aunts.

“The art of cooking,
like music,
is meant to give pleasure
and to tide people over troublesome times.”
-Alfred Walterspiel

Those years and those people had their hard times and lonely times. I don’t mean to over-sentimentalize the past. But it was a time when people lived more aware of the rhythms of the seasons. When neighbors were friends. When rituals celebrated simple things. When was the last time my neighbors and I gathered to help with work, and to linger for a celebratory meal afterwards? When have I ever known the supplier of my food well enough that I shook his hand in the transaction?

There are movements to bring back local connection. Kristin Schell, author of The Turquoise Table, is the woman behind a movement to bring back neighborhood connections. The Turquoise Table Also called front yard living, it doesn’t mean hosting, or entertaining. It revolves around a simple picnic table and an open heart.

“If you really want to make a friend,
go to someone’s house
and eat with him…
the people who give you their food
give you their heart.”
-Cesar Chavez

Hospitality over entertaining

Henri Nowen describes hospitality as “ the creation of free space where the stranger can enter and become a friend instead of an enemy. Hospitality is not to change people, but to offer them space where change can take place. It is not to bring men and women over to our side, but to offer freedom not disturbed by dividing lines.” 

We don’t need more Pinterest perfection, or more impressive hosting. We need a bowl of soup and an old frayed sweatshirt, and the comfort of a true friend’s presence. In Tish Harrison’s book, The Liturgy of the Ordinary, she says,

“Food has so much to teach us about nourishment,
and as a culture
we struggle with what it means
to be not simply fed,
but profoundly and holistically nourished.”

Today, that little girl that drank sugared milk with a splash of coffee at grandma’s table drinks her coffee black, and preferably from a French press. I love the conveniences of today – of Amazon Prime, and free grocery pickup. It opens up the potential for more time to spend with people.

But I don’t. I fill the space with other busyness instead.

One evening, I pulled out my aunt’s old recipe, and with buttery, sugared fingers rolled and twisted the fragrant pile of dough into the same beautiful coffee cake I remember so well. And I’m taken back to that long-ago kitchen. To that sense of place. Of belonging. I miss it. The summers that held those mornings are long gone, swept into oblivion with the passing of the seasons. That kitchen wouldn’t hold that sense of place for me any longer. It’s a stranger’s kitchen now. And I probably wouldn’t find it with those same people, if they were all alive.

Time changes us, and it’s likely I’d feel lonelier with them today. Perhaps that’s why those summer mornings are best as a memory. But I find whispers of it again, that belonging and togetherness, when I slow down and listen. It lingers in the presence of an old friend, in the feel of an old familiar book in my hands, and in the aroma of long-ago dinners that an old linen tablecloth holds, promising me that it is possible to find that connection. If I only make the time.

Perhaps I’ll be brave enough to put a turquoise table in my front yard someday, and forge friendships with the strangers that are my neighbors. But this summer, I will frequent the local markets, and perhaps get to know a few of the people behind the food-laden tables. And perhaps we’ll seal the purchase of homemade pastries and garden fresh watermelon with a handschlag.

“If more of us valued food and cheer and song
above hoarded gold,
it would be a merrier world.”
-J.R.R. Tolkien